Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which, we often yield as to a resistless power; nor can he reasonably expect, the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.”

— William Hazlitt

452. “As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.”

— William Hazlitt

453. “A thought must tell at once, or not at all.”

— William Hazlitt

454. “Genius is a native to the soil where it grows – is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun; and is not a hothouse plant or an exotic.”

— William Hazlitt

455. “When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.”

— William Hazlitt

456. “Death puts an end to rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.”

— William Hazlitt

457. “Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

459. “Good temper is an estate for life.”

— William Hazlitt

460. “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?”

— William Hazlitt

461. “Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.”

— William Hazlitt

462. “It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.”

— William Hazlitt

463. “Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.”

— William Hazlitt

464. “If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.”

— William Hazlitt

465. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

466. “The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.”

— William Hazlitt

467. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

468. “Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.”

— William Hazlitt

469. “We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

472. “Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it.”

— William Hazlitt

473. “He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.”

— William Hazlitt

474. “When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.”

— William Hazlitt

475. “Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

477. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

478. “Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.”

— William Hazlitt

479. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

481. “It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.”

— William Hazlitt

482. “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

483. “Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.”

— William Hazlitt

484. “The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.”

— William Hazlitt

485. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

486. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

487. “It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.”

— William Hazlitt

488. “He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight.”

— William Hazlitt

489. “Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?”

— William Hazlitt

490. “We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.”

— William Hazlitt

491. “The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.”

— William Hazlitt

492. “Avarice is the miser’s dream, as fame is the poet’s.”

— William Hazlitt

493. “Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.”

— William Hazlitt

494. “It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.”

— William Hazlitt

495. “Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.”

— William Hazlitt

496. “Let a man’s talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

499. “Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.”

— William Hazlitt

500. “We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.”

— William Hazlitt