William Hazlitt Quotes (345 Quotes)

Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

The most learned are often the most narrow minded.

The best way to procure insults is to submit to them.

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. . . .

Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.

To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

Everyone in a crowd has the power to throw dirt 9 out of 10 have the inclination.

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

The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

Surely, nothing is more simple than Time. His march is straightforward but we should have leisure allowed us to look back upon the distance we have come, and not be counting his steps every moment.

We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

Good temper is an estate for life.

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.

Silence is the one great art of conversation.

The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

The are of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

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

Envy is littleness of soul.

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness And decision of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it.

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.

The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.

No really great man ever thought himself so.

It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

I would like to spend my whole life traveling, if I could borrow another life to spend at home.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.

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

There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.

Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.

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

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Death cancels everything but truth and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred --it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies.

That which any one has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking

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.

The soul of conversation is sympathy.

Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.