William Hazlitt Quotes and Quotation

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• A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.

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

• A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.

• A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

• A wise traveler never despises his own country.

• An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.

• Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

• As is our confidence, so is our capacity.

• Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?

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

• Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
  • Variant: Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.

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

• 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.

• Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone— but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.

• 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.

• Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!

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

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

• 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.

• Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath— tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

• 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.

• First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.

• Gallantry to women - the sure road to their favor - is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it.

• General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

• Good temper is an estate for life.

• Good temper is one of the greatest preservers of the features.

• Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
  • Variant: Gracefulness has been defined to be the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.

• Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

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

• Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

• He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.

• He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

• Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.

• I am a metaphysician, and do not mind a blow; nothing but an idea hurts me.

• I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.

• I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.

• I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.

• I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.

• I should like to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.

• I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

• If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.

• 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.

• If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

• If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

• If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.

• Indolence is a delightful but distressing state. We must be doing something to be happy.

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

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

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

• It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.

• Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

• Life is short. Time is fleeting. Realise the Self. Purity of the heart is the gateway to God. Aspire. Renounce. Meditate. Be good; do good. Be kind; be compassionate. Inquire, know Thyself.

• Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

• Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

• 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.
  • Variant: 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 ought to be.

• Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols - it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.

• Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
  • Variant: People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

• 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.

• No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

• No truly great man ever thought himself so.
  • Variant: No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

• No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

• One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.

• One shining quality lends a luster to another, or hides some glaring defect.

• Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.

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

• Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

• 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.

• Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

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

• Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

• Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.

• Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.

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

• The are of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.

• The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
  • Variant: The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

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

• 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.

• The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

• The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

• The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.

• The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

• The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

• The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
  • Variant: The busier we are the more leisure we have.

• The most learned are often the most narrow minded.

• The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

• The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

• The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science and imposture is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.

• The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.

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

• The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

• The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.

• The public have neither shame or gratitude.

• The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

• The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

• The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public.

• The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.

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

• The truly proud man knows neither superiors nor inferiors. The first he does not admit of; the last he does not concern himself about.

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

• The way to procure insults is to submit to them: a man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

• The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.

• There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is, as they please or displease us.

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

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

• There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.

• There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.

• There is no 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.
  • Variant: There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

• There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

• They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
  • Variant: Actors are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

• Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.

• Those who can command themselves command others.

• Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.

• 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.

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

• To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

• To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.

• To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

• 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.

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

• We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

• We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.

• We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

• We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

• We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.

• We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

• We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

• We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

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

• We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

• When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

• Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

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

• You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

• Zeal will do more than knowledge.

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