William Hazlitt Quotes on Life (25 Quotes)

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!

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

Well Ive had a happy life.

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.

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

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.

If the schemes of Utopians could be realized, the tone of society would be changed from what it is, into a sort of insipid high life. There could be no fine tragedies written nor would there be any pleasure in seeing them. We tend to this conclusion already with the progress of civilization.

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

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim --objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them. . .

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.

There are only 3 pleasures in life pure and lasting, and they all are derived from inanimate things books, pictures, and the face of nature.

Life is the art of being well deceived.

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.

Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.

All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it

Actors are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream and the height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. They wear the livery of other men's fortunes their very thoughts are not their own.

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

At the outset of life . . . our imagination has a body to it.

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

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

Those who complain of the shortness of life, let it slide By them without wishing to seize and make the most of its golden moments.

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. . . .

Good temper is an estate for life.

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.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.