William Hazlitt Quotes
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
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A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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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.
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If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
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Hope is the best possession.
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The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
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If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
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The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.
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Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
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They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
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It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.
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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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To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
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The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.
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There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.
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Habit is necessary to give power.
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What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.
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The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
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In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
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There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.