William Hazlitt Quotes
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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.
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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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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 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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It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.
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People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.
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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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Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
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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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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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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
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We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
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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.
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Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
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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.
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Those who object to wit are envious of it.
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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.
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We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
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No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
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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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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.