Top 617 Quotes & Sayings by William Hazlitt - Page 8

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.

Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.

We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.

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.

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.

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.

We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves; yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance.

Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

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.

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?

Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence.

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

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.

Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.

Love 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.

Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.

There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.

When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.

Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.

Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

Books wind into the heart.

Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.

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.

It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.

We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.

There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which, we often yield as to a resistless power; nor can he reasonably expect, the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.

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.

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.

In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.

His hypothesis goes to this - to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.

The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.

Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.

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.

A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.

Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.

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.

The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.

A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.

Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.

It is a false principle that because we are entirely occupied with ourselves, we must equally occupy the thoughts of others. The contrary inference is the fair one.

There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass ""no day without a line""-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

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.

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.

Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.

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

Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before ithas had time to reconcile its feelings to the change in circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere sur prise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances.

Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.

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

We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.