William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.

William Hazlitt
We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object.

William Hazlitt
Death puts an end to rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.

William Hazlitt
To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.

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

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

William Hazlitt
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.

William Hazlitt
What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.

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
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 last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.

William Hazlitt
When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.

William Hazlitt
Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for one's dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead Downs.

William Hazlitt
The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.

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

William Hazlitt
The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.

William Hazlitt
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

William Hazlitt
A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.

William Hazlitt
Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.

William Hazlitt
He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to an end of his wealth.

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

William Hazlitt
Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.

William Hazlitt
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.

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

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
Popularity disarms envy in well-disposed minds. Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others who feel that the world has done them justice. When success has not this effect in opening the mind, it is a sign that it has been ill deserved.

William Hazlitt