William Hazlitt Quotes
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Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
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A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
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To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
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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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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
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A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.
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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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To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
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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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Those who object to wit are envious of it.
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Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.
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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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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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Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.
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People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
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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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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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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
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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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The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.