William Hazlitt Quotes

If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.

There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.

Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.

Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.

Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.

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

To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.

Life is the art of being well deceived.

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.

There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.

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

Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.

Well I've had a happy life.

The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.

Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.

There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.

The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.

Gallantry to women - the sure road to their favor - is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it

If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.

Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.

To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

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

Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

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

Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.

We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.

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

There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.

There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.

I am then never less alone than when alone

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.