William Hazlitt Quotes

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect.

Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.

A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.

Whatever interests is interesting.

We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.

To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

I am then never less alone than when alone

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

Books wind into the heart.

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.

There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.

The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.

An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.

Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.

It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.

There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.

The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.

Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.

If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.

People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.

That which is not, shall never be; that which is, shall never cease to be. To the wise, these truths are self-evident.

The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.

Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.

The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.

Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him.

Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.

Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else.

In what we really understand, we reason but little.

To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.

A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.

There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!

Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.

The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.

Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.

We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.