William Hazlitt - Art Quotes

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Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

William Hazlitt
The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.

William Hazlitt
The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.

William Hazlitt
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

William Hazlitt
In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason … If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

William Hazlitt
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.

William Hazlitt
Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing.

William Hazlitt
The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.

William Hazlitt
As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

William Hazlitt
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

William Hazlitt
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.

William Hazlitt
The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.

William Hazlitt
There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.

William Hazlitt
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

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

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