Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.”

— William Hazlitt

302. “Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.”

— William Hazlitt

303. “There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.”

— William Hazlitt

304. “To great evils we submit; yet we resent little provocations.”

— William Hazlitt

305. “There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.”

— William Hazlitt

306. “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less lone than when alone... I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country... I like solitude, when I give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude...”

— William Hazlitt

307. “There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.”

— William Hazlitt

308. “The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”

— William Hazlitt

309. “The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.”

— William Hazlitt

310. “It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.”

— William Hazlitt

311. “We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.”

— William Hazlitt

312. “The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.”

— William Hazlitt

313. “Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.”

— William Hazlitt

314. “People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.”

— William Hazlitt

315. “Good temper is one of the greatest preservers of the features.”

— William Hazlitt

316. “Love may turn to indifference with possession.”

— William Hazlitt

317. “Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.”

— William Hazlitt

318. “A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one – they show one another off to the best advantage.”

— William Hazlitt

319. “Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.”

— William Hazlitt

320. “If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.”

— William Hazlitt

321. “Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.”

— William Hazlitt

322. “To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.”

— William Hazlitt

323. “The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.”

— William Hazlitt

324. “Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.”

— William Hazlitt

325. “It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.”

— William Hazlitt

326. “The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.”

— William Hazlitt

327. “A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.”

— William Hazlitt

328. “The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.”

— William Hazlitt

329. “One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.”

— William Hazlitt

330. “We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.”

— William Hazlitt

331. “The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.”

— William Hazlitt

332. “Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.”

— William Hazlitt

333. “In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.”

— William Hazlitt

334. “The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.”

— William Hazlitt

335. “Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.”

— William Hazlitt

336. “You are never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered.”

— William Hazlitt

337. “Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.”

— William Hazlitt

338. “We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.”

— William Hazlitt

339. “Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.”

— William Hazlitt

340. “There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.”

— William Hazlitt

341. “The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.”

— William Hazlitt

342. “We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.”

— William Hazlitt

343. “We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.”

— William Hazlitt

344. “I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.”

— William Hazlitt

345. “General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.”

— William Hazlitt

346. “We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility.”

— William Hazlitt

347. “In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.”

— William Hazlitt

348. “While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.”

— William Hazlitt

349. “To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.”

— William Hazlitt

350. “A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.”

— William Hazlitt