William Hazlitt Quotes

Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.

Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.

We had as lief not be as not be ourselves.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

A strong passion for any object will ensure success for the desire of the end will point out the means.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.

THE rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception beforehand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but pr

We must be doing something to be happy.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one 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.

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 might have been.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

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

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.

The love of liberty is the love of others the love of power is the love of ourselves.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.

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

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 might have been.

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

Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.

Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out of malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavourable impression it is not necessary that certain things should be true but that they have been said.