William Hazlitt Quotes
-
Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
-
I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
-
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
-
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.
-
Habit is necessary to give power.
-
Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
-
Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
-
His hypothesis goes to this - to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.
-
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.
-
A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
-
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
-
A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
-
Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
-
To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
-
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
-
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.
-
Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.
-
Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
-
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".
-
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.
-
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
-
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.
-
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
-
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good – fortune.