William Hazlitt Quotes
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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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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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We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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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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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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Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
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Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
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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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Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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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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The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
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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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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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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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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 mighty stream of tendency.
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
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Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
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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.