William Hazlitt Quotes

Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.

Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.

The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.

Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.

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

When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.

We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.

It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.

The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.

Reflection makes men cowards.

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

No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.

Envy is littleness of soul.

Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.

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.

Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.

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

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

I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

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

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?

Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.

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

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

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

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.

Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.

To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.

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?

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.

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

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken

A thought must tell at once, or not at all.

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.

No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.

No really great man ever thought himself so.

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

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

We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object.

If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.

The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.

The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.

No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

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

Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence.

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.

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