William Hazlitt Life Quotations

The more we do, the more we can do.

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

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

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!

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

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

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.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

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

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!

I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.

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

The world judge of men by their ability in their professions, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is on that on which our success in life depends

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

The young are prodigal of life from a superabundance of it; the old are tenacious on the same score, because they have little left, and cannot enjoy even what remains of it.

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.

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

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.

Good temper is an estate for life.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

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

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. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.

A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.

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.

Well I've had a happy life.