William Hazlitt - Nature Quotes

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The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

William Hazlitt
His works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature. This is indeed to be an author!

William Hazlitt
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with out understandings and our hearts.

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
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to do it myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.

William Hazlitt
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.

William Hazlitt
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

William Hazlitt
The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.

William Hazlitt
General principles are not the less true or important because, from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it, or like that secret influence which binds the world together and holds the planets in their orbits.

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
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
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
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
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
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