William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

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

William Hazlitt
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.

William Hazlitt
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt
The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.

William Hazlitt
We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
He changes his opinions as he does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed principles; as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels with it. He has no satisfaction but the chase after truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like a vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the leaders perpetually at fault.

William Hazlitt
The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.

William Hazlitt
The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

William Hazlitt
We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

William Hazlitt
Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.

William Hazlitt
Horas non numero nisi serenas is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled.

William Hazlitt
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

William Hazlitt
You know more of a road by having travelled it then by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

William Hazlitt
We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.

William Hazlitt
They [universities] may be said to resemble antiquated coquettes of the last age, who think everything ridiculous and intolerable but what was in fashion when they were young, and yet are standing proofs of the progress of taste and the vanity of human pretensions. Our universities are, in a great measure, become cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge. … they can only be of service as a check-weight on the too hasty and rapid career of innovation. … The unavoidable aim of all corporate bodies of learning is not to grow wise, or teach others wisdom, but to prevent any one else from being or seeming wiser than themselves.

William Hazlitt