William Hazlitt Quotes
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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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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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To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.
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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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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
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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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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 most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
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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 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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Those who object to wit are envious of it.
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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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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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I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
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A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.
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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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Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
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We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
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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.