Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.”

— William Hazlitt

252. “We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.”

— William Hazlitt

253. “There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything; and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.”

— William Hazlitt

254. “A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer – that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.”

— William Hazlitt

255. “Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.”

— William Hazlitt

256. “Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.”

— William Hazlitt

257. “There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.”

— William Hazlitt

258. “Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.”

— William Hazlitt

259. “The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.”

— William Hazlitt

260. “To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.”

— William Hazlitt

261. “Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.”

— William Hazlitt

262. “If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.”

— William Hazlitt

263. “Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.”

— William Hazlitt

264. “Reflection makes men cowards.”

— William Hazlitt

265. “Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.”

— William Hazlitt

266. “To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.”

— William Hazlitt

267. “The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.”

— William Hazlitt

268. “Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.”

— William Hazlitt

269. “One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.”

— William Hazlitt

270. “The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.”

— William Hazlitt

271. “Those who object to wit are envious of it.”

— William Hazlitt

272. “Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.”

— William Hazlitt

273. “No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.”

— William Hazlitt

274. “Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.”

— William Hazlitt

275. “Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.”

— William Hazlitt

276. “Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.”

— William Hazlitt

277. “The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.”

— William Hazlitt

278. “Time, – the most independent of all things.”

— William Hazlitt

279. “There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.”

— William Hazlitt

280. “A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it.”

— William Hazlitt

281. “Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.”

— William Hazlitt

282. “I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.”

— William Hazlitt

283. “Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.”

— William Hazlitt

284. “Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.”

— William Hazlitt

285. “The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.”

— William Hazlitt

286. “One said a tooth drawer was a kind of unconscionable trade, because his trade was nothing else but to take away those things whereby every man gets his living.”

— William Hazlitt

287. “I have known persons without a friend – never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.”

— William Hazlitt

288. “What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.”

— William Hazlitt

289. “When you find out a man’s ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.”

— William Hazlitt

290. “There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.”

— William Hazlitt

291. “A great mind is one that can forget or look beyond itself.”

— William Hazlitt

292. “Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.”

— William Hazlitt

293. “Abuse is an indirect species of homage.”

— William Hazlitt

294. “Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”

— William Hazlitt

295. “Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.”

— William Hazlitt

296. “To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.”

— William Hazlitt

297. “Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.”

— William Hazlitt

298. “We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.”

— William Hazlitt

299. “There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.”

— William Hazlitt

300. “We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person’s.”

— William Hazlitt