Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.”

— William Hazlitt

202. “The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness.”

— William Hazlitt

203. “A woman’s vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.”

— William Hazlitt

204. “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

205. “If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.”

— William Hazlitt

206. “The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.”

— William Hazlitt

207. “Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.”

— William Hazlitt

208. “Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.”

— William Hazlitt

209. “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

210. “The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.”

— William Hazlitt

211. “To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.”

— William Hazlitt

212. “Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.”

— William Hazlitt

213. “The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.”

— William Hazlitt

214. “The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.”

— William Hazlitt

215. “Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.”

— William Hazlitt

216. “Gallantry to women – the sure road to their favor – is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it.”

— William Hazlitt

217. “To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.”

— William Hazlitt

218. “True friendship is self-love at second-hand.”

— William Hazlitt

219. “I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.”

— William Hazlitt

220. “If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.”

— William Hazlitt

221. “The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.”

— William Hazlitt

222. “The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.”

— William Hazlitt

223. “Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.”

— William Hazlitt

224. “When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face, – compare notes and chat the hour away.”

— William Hazlitt

225. “We often choose a friend as we do a mistress – for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.”

— William Hazlitt

226. “There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.”

— William Hazlitt

227. “The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.”

— William Hazlitt

228. “We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.”

— William Hazlitt

229. “So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.”

— William Hazlitt

230. “He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.”

— William Hazlitt

231. “No young man ever thinks he shall die.”

— William Hazlitt

232. “Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.”

— William Hazlitt

233. “There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.”

— William Hazlitt

234. “Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.”

— William Hazlitt

235. “The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.”

— William Hazlitt

236. “The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.”

— William Hazlitt

237. “To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.”

— William Hazlitt

238. “He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.”

— William Hazlitt

239. “There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!”

— William Hazlitt

240. “Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.”

— William Hazlitt

241. “We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.”

— William Hazlitt

242. “The measure of any man’s virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.”

— William Hazlitt

243. “He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.”

— William Hazlitt

244. “Principle is a passion for truth.”

— William Hazlitt

245. “Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.”

— William Hazlitt

246. “I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.”

— William Hazlitt

247. “Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.”

— William Hazlitt

248. “Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.”

— William Hazlitt

249. “That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.”

— William Hazlitt

250. “But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.”

— William Hazlitt