William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

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
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
It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.

William Hazlitt
Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.

William Hazlitt
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.

William Hazlitt
The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.

William Hazlitt
Poverty, when it is voluntary, is never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect.

William Hazlitt
Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.

William Hazlitt
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.

William Hazlitt
By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.

William Hazlitt
The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.

William Hazlitt
There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything; and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.

William Hazlitt
A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

William Hazlitt
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.

William Hazlitt