William Hazlitt Quotes
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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 hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
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We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.
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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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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 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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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
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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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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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Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
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The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
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A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
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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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A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.
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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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Principle is a passion for truth.
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If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.
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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
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There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
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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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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.