William Hazlitt Quotes
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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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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It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.
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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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We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
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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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Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good – fortune.
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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 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 wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
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The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
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Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).
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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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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, "No. There was a fire in the room."
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Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
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We must be doing something to be happy.
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When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
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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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Good temper is an estate for life.
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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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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.