William Hazlitt Quotes
-
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
-
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
-
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.
-
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
-
Habit is necessary to give power.
-
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
-
There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything; and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.
-
Principle is a passion for truth.
-
It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.
-
The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
-
Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
-
He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
-
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
-
The public have neither shame or gratitude.
-
Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
-
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.
-
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
-
The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
-
No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
-
Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
-
The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
-
Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
-
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.
-
Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.