William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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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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The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.
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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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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
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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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In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
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We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
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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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Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.
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I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me
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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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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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Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
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A mighty stream of tendency.
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Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
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Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
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Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.