William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.

William Hazlitt
The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.

William Hazlitt
Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.

William Hazlitt
Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.

William Hazlitt
Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.

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

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

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

William Hazlitt
As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect.

William Hazlitt
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.

William Hazlitt
That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.

William Hazlitt
The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.

William Hazlitt
Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.

William Hazlitt
Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly.

William Hazlitt
None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.

William Hazlitt
The multitude who require to be led, still hate their leaders.

William Hazlitt
When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.

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
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
To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.

William Hazlitt
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.

William Hazlitt