Top 617 Quotes & Sayings by William Hazlitt - Page 4

Keep your misfortunes to yourself.

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.

Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.

The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.

We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.

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

Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.

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.

People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!

Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.

Abuse is an indirect species of homage.

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.

The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it

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

There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!

Malice often takes the garb of truth.

Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.

The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.

Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

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

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.

When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.

Love and joy are twins or born of each other.

We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.

It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.

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

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.

Hope is the best possession.

He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.

I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.

The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.

A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

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

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

The multitude who require to be led, still hate their leaders.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.

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

But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.

Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people.

Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.

No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

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

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.

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

We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.

Those who object to wit are envious of it.

In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

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