William Hazlitt Quotes

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.

In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

A great mind is one that can forget or look beyond itself.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it

The more you do, the more you can do.

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

Good temper is an estate for life.

Abuse is an indirect species of homage.

Whatever interests is interesting.

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.

The more we do, the more we can do.

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

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

We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.

A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.

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.

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

A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth.

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.

Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.

One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.

There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. 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.

Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.

Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.

Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.

Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

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

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

A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.

There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.

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

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.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.

Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.

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