William Hazlitt Quotes

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

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

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

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, "No. There was a fire in the room."

Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.

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!

He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.

A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them

Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?

...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.

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

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

In what we really understand, we reason but little.

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

We must be doing something to be happy.

The youth is better than the old age of friendship.

The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness.

The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.

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.

Grace in women has more effect than beauty. We sometimes see a certain fine self-possession, an habitual voluptuousness of character, which reposes on its own sensations and derives pleasure from all around it, that is more irresistible than any other attraction. There is an air of languid enjoyment in such persons, "in their eyes, in their arms, and their hands, and their face," which robs us of ourselves, and draws us by a secret sympathy towards them.

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

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.

Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.

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

Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism; and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.

Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.

We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.

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

Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.

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

Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.

A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.

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

Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.

Death puts an end to rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.

The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.

I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.

Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.

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

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.

The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.