William Hazlitt Quotes
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Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
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Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
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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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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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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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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
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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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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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I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
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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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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.
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
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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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Habit is necessary to give power.
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
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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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I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.
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To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
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Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.
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The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.