William Hazlitt Quotes

434 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hazlitt