William Hazlitt Quotes
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The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
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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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Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
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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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A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.
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Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before ithas had time to reconcile its feelings to the change in circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere sur prise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances.
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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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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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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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
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They [corporations] feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.
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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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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 often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.
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No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
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It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.
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Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.
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Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
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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.