William Hazlitt > Quotes

“The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“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.”
― William Hazlitt

“Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own."

[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]”
― William Hazlitt, Essays of William Hazlitt: Selected and Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Frank Carr

“In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“Love turns, with little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”
― William Hazlitt, On The Pleasure of Hating

“We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.”
― William Hazlitt, Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims

“The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.”
― William Hazlitt

“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
(1778 - 1830)”
― William Hazlitt

“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.”
― William Hazlitt

“Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits.”
― William Hazlitt

“Life is the art of being well-deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.”
― William Hazlitt, The Round Table: 1817

“Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”
― William Hazlitt

“I'm not smart, but I like to observe.
Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why,”
― William Hazlitt, Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims

“To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.”
― William Hazlitt

“The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.”
― William Hazlitt

“If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.”
― William Hazlitt

“Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?”
― William Hazlitt, On The Pleasure of Hating

“A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.”
― William Hazlitt, Table-Talk, Essays on Men and Manners

“Prejudice is the child of ignorance.”
― William Hazlitt

“I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the report of it reach me. Therefore I have made many enemies and few friends; for the public know nothing of well-wishers, and keep a wary eye on those who would reform them.”
― William Hazlitt

“Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.”
― William Hazlitt

“The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.”
― William Hazlitt, Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims

“Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?”
― William Hazlitt

“In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is 'the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, – seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy – mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; 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.”
― William Hazlitt, On The Pleasure of Hating

“Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.”
― William Hazlitt

“The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.”
― William Hazlitt

“We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.”
― William Hazlitt

“All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it”
― William Hazlitt