William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.

William Hazlitt
Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.

William Hazlitt
In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.

William Hazlitt
Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.

William Hazlitt
Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.

William Hazlitt
When we forget old friends, it is a sign we have forgotten ourselves.

William Hazlitt
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

William Hazlitt
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!

William Hazlitt
Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.

William Hazlitt
We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.

William Hazlitt
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.

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

William Hazlitt
To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.

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

William Hazlitt
The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.

William Hazlitt
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.

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

William Hazlitt
I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.

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
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.

William Hazlitt
I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.

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

William Hazlitt
Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.

William Hazlitt
I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.

William Hazlitt
We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

William Hazlitt
He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight.

William Hazlitt