William Hazlitt Quotes

No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.

A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.

Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.

Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.

A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.

Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.

Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.

Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.

Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.

A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.

We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.

There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.

Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly.

All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.

Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.

Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.

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.

To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.

He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.

Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

The look of a gentleman is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world.

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our

the old maxim... "there are three things necessary to success in life--Impudence! Impudence! Impudence!

The path of genius is free, and its own

The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.

Love turns, with little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.

Never so sure our rapture to createAs when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.

Sacrifices are no sacrifices when they are repaid a thousand fold.

Repose is necessary to great efforts, and he who is never idle, labours in vain!

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a

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 only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

Prosperity is a great teacher adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind privation trains and strengthens it.

The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way: an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty hesitation or incongruity.

We may be willing to tell a story twice never to hear it more than once.

Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.

Reason with most people means their own opinions.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: The one thinks everything right that is French the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

A strong passion for any object will ensure success for the desire of the end will point out the means.