William Hazlitt Quotes
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The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.
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A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.
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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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Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
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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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It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
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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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Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
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Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
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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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Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
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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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He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".
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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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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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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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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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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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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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There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.