Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

353. “One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

356. “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

357. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

359. “A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.”

— William Hazlitt

360. “Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.”

— William Hazlitt

361. “An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself.”

— William Hazlitt

362. “The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.”

— William Hazlitt

363. “I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.”

— William Hazlitt

364. “By retaliating our sufferings on the heads of those we love, we get rid of a present uneasiness and incur lasting remorse. With the accomplishment of our revenge our fondness returns; so that we feel the injury we have done them, even more than they do.”

— William Hazlitt

365. “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

366. “Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.”

— William Hazlitt

367. “There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.”

— William Hazlitt

368. “The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous – the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.”

— William Hazlitt

369. “Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.”

— William Hazlitt

370. “Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.”

— William Hazlitt

371. “The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.”

— William Hazlitt

372. “Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.”

— William Hazlitt

373. “We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.”

— William Hazlitt

374. “Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.”

— William Hazlitt

375. “The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.”

— William Hazlitt

376. “The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.”

— William Hazlitt

377. “Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.”

— William Hazlitt

378. “Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.”

— William Hazlitt

379. “Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.”

— William Hazlitt

380. “Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.”

— William Hazlitt

381. “We must be doing something to be happy.”

— William Hazlitt

382. “The worst old age is that of the mind.”

— William Hazlitt

383. “Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.”

— William Hazlitt

384. “It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.”

— William Hazlitt

385. “People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.”

— William Hazlitt

386. “To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.”

— William Hazlitt

387. “It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.”

— William Hazlitt

388. “If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.”

— William Hazlitt

389. “One said he wondered that leather was not dearer than any other thing. Being demanded a reason: because, saith he, it is more stood upon than any other thing in the world.”

— William Hazlitt

390. “Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else.”

— William Hazlitt

391. “I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.”

— William Hazlitt

392. “The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.”

— William Hazlitt

393. “The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.”

— William Hazlitt

394. “Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.”

— William Hazlitt

395. “Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.”

— William Hazlitt

396. “To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.”

— William Hazlitt

397. “Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.”

— William Hazlitt

398. “What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.”

— William Hazlitt

399. “It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.”

— William Hazlitt

400. “A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.”

— William Hazlitt