William Hazlitt - Life Quotes

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First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions. A man's look is the work of years, it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.

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

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
Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

William Hazlitt
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.

William Hazlitt
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern — why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

William Hazlitt
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!

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
Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

William Hazlitt
The Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries long life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side — the side of corruption and prerogative.

William Hazlitt
So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

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

William Hazlitt
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.

William Hazlitt
The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

William Hazlitt
I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.

William Hazlitt
They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.

William Hazlitt
We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

William Hazlitt
The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is on that on which our success in life depends.

William Hazlitt
A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.

William Hazlitt
There is (so to speak) "a mighty stream of tendency" to good in the human mind, upon which all objects float and are imperceptibly borne along; and though in the voyage of life we meet with strong rebuffs, with rocks and quicksands, yet there is a "a tide in the affairs of men," a heaving and a restless aspiration of the soul, by means of which, "with sails and tackle torn," the wreck and scattered fragments of our entire being drift into the port and haven of our desires!

William Hazlitt
All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.

William Hazlitt
Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.

William Hazlitt
Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power and fashion … who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the day. There are persons in common life who … can so little bear to be left for any length of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly, that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters … Milton was not one of these. He had lofty contemplative principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, [not] to be tempted by such idle baits.

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