William Hazlitt Quotes

In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.

No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.

A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.

...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.

Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.

Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.

The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.

It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.

That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.

Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.

The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.

In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.

One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.

The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.

Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.

As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.

You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.

Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.

Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.

Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.

Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.

One said he wondered that leather was not dearer than any other thing. Being demanded a reason: because, saith he, it is more stood upon than any other thing in the world.

We go on a journey to be free of all impediments; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others

A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.

A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.

Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.

Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.

Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

The youth is better than the old age of friendship.

A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.

Well I've had a happy life.

Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.