William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be as constantly wound up.

William Hazlitt
The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.

William Hazlitt
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

William Hazlitt
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

William Hazlitt
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

William Hazlitt
It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.

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

William Hazlitt
Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

William Hazlitt
Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

William Hazlitt
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.

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

William Hazlitt
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.

William Hazlitt
However we may flatter ourselves to the contrary, our friends think no higher of us than the world do. They see us through the jaundiced or distrustful eyes of others. They may know better, but their feelings are governed by popular prejudice. Nay, they are more shy of us (when under a cloud) than even strangers; for we involve them in a common disgrace, or compel them to embroil themselves in continual quarrels and disputes in our defense.

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

William Hazlitt
Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

William Hazlitt
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.

William Hazlitt
Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him.

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.

William Hazlitt
Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

William Hazlitt
Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.

William Hazlitt
From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.

William Hazlitt
The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.

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

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

William Hazlitt