William Hazlitt Quotes on World (18 Quotes)

If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.

The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.

Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.

When a person dies who does any one thing better than anyone else in the world, which so many others are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in society.

What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it it is as if no one know there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.

It is well that there is no one without a fault for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species.

If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will. . .

A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them.

It is great to shake off the trammels of the world and of public opinion . . . and become the creature of the moment . . . known by no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour.

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey but I like to go by myself.

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.

You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world. . . . He is power, passion, self-will personified.

Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.