William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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Hope is the best possession.
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The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
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Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
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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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If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
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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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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 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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The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
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Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
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We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object.
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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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There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.
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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
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The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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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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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.