William Hazlitt Quotes
-
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.
-
Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
-
A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
-
The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
-
Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
-
Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
-
He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight.
-
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.
-
To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
-
Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
-
Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
-
The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.
-
It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
-
One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
-
A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.
-
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
-
People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.
-
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.
-
There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
-
A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
-
The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
-
Those who object to wit are envious of it.
-
There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.
-
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.