William Hazlitt Quotes
-
The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
-
There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
-
Malice often takes the garb of truth.
-
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
-
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.
-
The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
-
Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking! ... I begin to feel, think, and be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.
-
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
-
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.
-
We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
-
The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
-
Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
-
Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.
-
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.
-
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
-
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
-
Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
-
We must be doing something to be happy.
-
People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
-
Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object.