William Hazlitt Quotes

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

Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

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

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

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

Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.

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

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

have I not the reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.

Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told.

Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.

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.

Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

We cannot read the same works forever. Our honey-moon, even though we wed the Muse, must come to an end; and it is followed by indifference, if not by disgust.

Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.

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

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.

A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.

He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.

A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

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.

I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it.

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

No really great man ever thought himself so.

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

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

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

I have known persons without a friend
never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.

Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

Love and joy are twins or born of each other.

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

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 English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

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.

Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite

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

Books wind into the heart.

Good temper is an estate for life.

I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

Envy is littleness of soul.

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.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

Thus, to give an obvious instance, if I have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its feet, I am sure that wherever I can find a tree and a brook, I can enjoy the same pleasure again. Hence, when I imagine these objects, I can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology.

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

None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.

Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.

We must be doing something to be happy.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!

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

The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.

What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.

Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.

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.

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

Well I've had a happy life.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.

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

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.

Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]

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

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?

But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.

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

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.

Habit is necessary to give power.

The more a man writes, the more he can write.

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.

A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated desires or forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two - not our exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think while there - that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it.

The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

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

I do not know any moral to be deduced from this view of the subject [of personal character], but one, namely, that we should mind our own business, cultivate our good qualities, if we have any, and irritate ourselves less about the absurdities of other people, which neither we nor they can help. I grant there is something in which I have said which I might be made to glance towards the doctrine of original sin, grace, election, reprobation, or the Gnostic Principle that acts did not determine the virtue or vice of the character; and in those doctrines, so far as they are deducible from what I have said, I agree
but always with a salvo.

Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.

We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.

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

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.

He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will -the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.

The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference; it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.

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.

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.

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.

Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.