William Hazlitt Quotes
-
Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
-
The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.
-
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.
-
Good temper is an estate for life.
-
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
-
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
-
Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
-
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.
-
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.
-
His hypothesis goes to this - to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.
-
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
-
The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
-
The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
-
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.
-
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
-
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
-
Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch.
-
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
-
Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
-
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.
-
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
-
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
-
The public have neither shame or gratitude.
-
We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.