William Hazlitt Quotes
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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 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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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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We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
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Good temper is an estate for life.
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No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
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Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
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Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
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Malice often takes the garb of truth.
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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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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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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.
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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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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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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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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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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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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.
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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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We must be doing something to be happy.