William Hazlitt Quotes
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
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The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.
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One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
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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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I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like, grave or gay, black, brown, or fair; with golden tresses or raven locks; - and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck.
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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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To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.
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Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.
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The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.
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All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
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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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We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
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Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
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Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
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To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
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Malice often takes the garb of truth.
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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
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It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
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Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him.
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A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
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Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.