William Hazlitt Quotations | Page 4

We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.

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

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

Envy is littleness of soul.

Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.

The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.

Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.

Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?

A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.

We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.

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

I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.

Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.

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.

The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.

A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

True friendship is self-love at second-hand.

From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.

Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.

The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.

Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.

Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.

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.

To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.

Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.

The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.

What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.

The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.

Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.

We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.

Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

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

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

In what we really understand, we reason but little.

Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.

Habit is necessary to give power.

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.

Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.

Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.

Popularity disarms envy in well-disposed minds. Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others who feel that the world has done them justice. When success has not this effect in opening the mind, it is a sign that it has been ill deserved.

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

Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.

We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.

A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.

Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.

Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?

The youth is better than the old age of friendship.

The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.

Books wind into the heart.

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness.

The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.

I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.

It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.

If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.

Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.

The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.

Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.

There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass ""no day without a line""-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.

The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.

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.

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.

Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.

Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.

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.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

Time,--the most independent of all things.

A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth.

The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.

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.

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.