Will Hazlitt Quotes
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.
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.
Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
Inflation is not only unnecessary for economic growth. As long as it exists it is the enemy of economic growth.
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
The more things a government undertakes to do, the fewer things it can do completely. When the government tries to do everything it must do everything badly.
Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.'
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
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.
Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.
There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
