William Hazlitt Quotes
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To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
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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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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
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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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Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
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Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
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Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.
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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.
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That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.
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He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
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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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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.
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Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
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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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I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
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Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.