Will Hazlitt Quotes

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

Love and joy are twins or born of each other.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.

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.

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.

The system of capitalism, of the market economy, is a system of freedom, of justice, of productivity. But these three virtues cannot be separated. Each flows out of the other.

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.

From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation.

The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.

Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.

Elegance is something more than ease; it is more than a freedom from awkwardness or restraint. It implies, I conceive, a precision, a polish, a sparkling, spirited yet delicate.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

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.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.

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.

The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.

We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.

The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

Who likes not his business, his business likes not him.

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

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.

Those who can command themselves command others.

It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.

Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.

I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.

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.

Life is the art of being well deceived.

Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.

Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.