William Hazlitt Quotes on Truth (12 Quotes)


    There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.

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

    There is nothing more likely to drive a person mad than . . . an obstinate, constitutional preference of the truth to the agreeable.

    Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.

    Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols --it is all that they ask the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.


    The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.

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

    Political truth is a libel - religious truth, blasphemy.

    In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.

    We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in nostrums, but are willing to try ourselves whether there is any truth in them.

    He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable intellectual riches while he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the whole meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to some things shortsightedness to others. Every mind is not a gauge and measure of truth. Nature has her surface and her dark recesses. She is deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her fullest impressions that can penetrate her shrine or unveil her Holy of Holies. It is only those whom she has filled with her spirit that have the boldness or the power to reveal her mysteries to others.

    Vice is man's nature virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.


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