Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.”

— William Hazlitt

152. “Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken.”

— William Hazlitt

153. “The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.”

— William Hazlitt

154. “Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.”

— William Hazlitt

155. “Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.”

— William Hazlitt

156. “The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.”

— William Hazlitt

157. “Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols – it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.”

— William Hazlitt

158. “The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.”

— William Hazlitt

159. “Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.”

— William Hazlitt

160. “Love at first sight is only realizing an imagination that has always haunted us; or meeting with a face, a figure, or cast of expression in perfection that we have seen and admired in a less degree or in less favorable circumstances a hundred times before.”

— William Hazlitt

161. “Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.”

— William Hazlitt

162. “Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.”

— William Hazlitt

163. “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

164. “Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.”

— William Hazlitt

165. “The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.”

— William Hazlitt

166. “If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.”

— William Hazlitt

167. “Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.”

— William Hazlitt

168. “Whatever interests is interesting.”

— William Hazlitt

169. “Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.”

— William Hazlitt

170. “Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.”

— William Hazlitt

171. “The essence of poetry is will and passion.”

— William Hazlitt

172. “Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.”

— William Hazlitt

173. “A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could.”

— William Hazlitt

174. “We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.”

— William Hazlitt

175. “The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.”

— William Hazlitt

176. “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.”

— William Hazlitt

177. “The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.”

— William Hazlitt

178. “The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.”

— William Hazlitt

179. “Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.”

— William Hazlitt

180. “We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.”

— William Hazlitt

181. “They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.”

— William Hazlitt

182. “You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.”

— William Hazlitt

183. “We are not hypocrites in our sleep.”

— William Hazlitt

184. “A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.”

— William Hazlitt

185. “Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism; and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.”

— William Hazlitt

186. “To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.”

— William Hazlitt

187. “Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

189. “Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.”

— William Hazlitt

190. “The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics – mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.”

— William Hazlitt

191. “One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.”

— William Hazlitt

192. “Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.”

— William Hazlitt

193. “Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.”

— William Hazlitt

194. “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

195. “Envy is littleness of soul.”

— William Hazlitt

196. “In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.”

— William Hazlitt

197. “Books wind into the heart.”

— William Hazlitt

198. “Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.”

— William Hazlitt

199. “Dandyism is a species of genius.”

— William Hazlitt

200. “The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.”

— William Hazlitt