Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The incentive to ambition is the love of power.”

— William Hazlitt

52. “The most learned are often the most narrow minded.”

— William Hazlitt

53. “Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”

— William Hazlitt

54. “There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.”

— William Hazlitt

55. “Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.”

— William Hazlitt

56. “Actors are the only honest hypocrites.”

— William Hazlitt

57. “A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.”

— William Hazlitt

58. “People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.”

— William Hazlitt

59. “Well I’ve had a happy life.”

— William Hazlitt

60. “What I mean by living to one’s self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.”

— William Hazlitt

61. “Love and joy are twins or born of each other.”

— William Hazlitt

62. “Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

64. “Rules and models destroy genius and art.”

— William Hazlitt

65. “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

66. “The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.”

— William Hazlitt

67. “True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves – neither more nor less.”

— William Hazlitt

68. “When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.”

— William Hazlitt

69. “The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.”

— William Hazlitt

70. “The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right.”

— William Hazlitt

71. “Experience makes us wise.”

— William Hazlitt

72. “Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.”

— William Hazlitt

73. “Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.”

— William Hazlitt

74. “A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.”

— William Hazlitt

75. “The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.”

— William Hazlitt

76. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

77. “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

78. “Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.”

— William Hazlitt

79. “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

80. “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.”

— William Hazlitt

81. “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 fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.”

— William Hazlitt

82. “Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

85. “The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.”

— William Hazlitt

86. “A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.”

— William Hazlitt

87. “He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.”

— William Hazlitt

88. “The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.”

— William Hazlitt

89. “Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith’s bellows: they take breath but are not alive.”

— William Hazlitt

90. “Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.”

— William Hazlitt

91. “To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.”

— William Hazlitt

92. “The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.”

— William Hazlitt

93. “The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.”

— William Hazlitt

94. “We dread life’s termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.”

— William Hazlitt

95. “Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.”

— William Hazlitt

96. “People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy’s sake.”

— William Hazlitt

97. “Vice is man’s nature: virtue is a habit – or a mask.”

— William Hazlitt

98. “A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.”

— William Hazlitt

99. “Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence.”

— William Hazlitt

100. “Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite.”

— William Hazlitt