William Hazlitt Quotes
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We must be doing something to be happy.
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An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
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Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.
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A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
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In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.
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Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.
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We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
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Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
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I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.
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When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.
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Habit is necessary to give power.
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The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
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Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
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Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.