William Hazlitt - Man Quotes

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Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.

William Hazlitt
A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.

William Hazlitt
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

William Hazlitt
Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.

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

William Hazlitt
A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.

William Hazlitt
A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.

William Hazlitt
I think it is a rule that men in business should not be taught other things. Any one will be almost sure to make money who has no other idea in his head. A college education, or intense study of abstract truth, will not enable a man to drive a bargain … The best politicians are not those who are deeply grounded in mathematical or in ethical science. Rules stand in the way of expediency. Many a man has been hindered from pushing his fortune in the world by an early cultivation of his moral sense.

William Hazlitt
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

William Hazlitt
There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.

William Hazlitt
When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!

William Hazlitt
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.

William Hazlitt
No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

William Hazlitt
The truly proud man knows neither superiors nor inferiors. The first he does not admit of: the last he does not concern himself about.

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

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

William Hazlitt
Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

William Hazlitt
The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

William Hazlitt
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
His hypothesis goes to this — to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.

William Hazlitt
Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are. They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot understand this at all. What is the use of a man's always revolving round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it himself, as well as tire other people.

William Hazlitt
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

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
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.

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
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

William Hazlitt
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

William Hazlitt
An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.

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
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

William Hazlitt