William Hazlitt Quotes
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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.
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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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People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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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.
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We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).
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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.
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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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Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
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Malice often takes the garb of truth.
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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.
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When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
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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.
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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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Good temper is an estate for life.
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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 thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
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The public have neither shame or gratitude.
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Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
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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.