When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
William HazlittBy retaliating our sufferings on the heads of those we love, we get rid of a present uneasiness and incur lasting remorse. With the accomplishment of our revenge our fondness returns; so that we feel the injury we have done them, even more than they do.
William HazlittGreatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.
William HazlittSincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.
William HazlittWe prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.
William HazlittOur 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.
William HazlittWe often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
William HazlittA situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
William HazlittLove at first sight is only realizing an imagination that has always haunted us; or meeting with a face, a figure, or cast of expression in perfection that we have seen and admired in a less degree or in less favorable circumstances a hundred times before.
William HazlittThe greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
William HazlittTrue modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
William HazlittThe dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
William HazlittFame 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.
William HazlittThe 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.
William HazlittPerhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.
William HazlittAlmost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
William HazlittProsperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
William HazlittThe 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.
William HazlittThose who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
William HazlittIt might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.
William HazlittCunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
William HazlittFew 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.
William HazlittThe most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
William HazlittFashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
William HazlittWe 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.
William HazlittA lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.
William HazlittA man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
William HazlittCowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
William HazlittPoetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
William HazlittThe 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.
William HazlittThe chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
William HazlittThe Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
William HazlittAs hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
William HazlittI 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.
William Hazlitt