William Hazlitt Quotes

Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.

When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.

An honest man is respected by all parties.

Keep your misfortunes to yourself.

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.

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 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.

I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.

A wise traveler never despises his own country.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

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.

Experience makes us wise.

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

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

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

The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

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

Love and joy are twins or born of each other.

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.

A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

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

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

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

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.

It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

Poverty, when it is voluntary, is never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect.

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.

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.

Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.

The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.

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.

The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

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

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

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

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.

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.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

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.

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