Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

353. “Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!”

— William Hazlitt

354. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

359. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

361. “The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

364. “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

365. “Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

371. “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

372. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

375. “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

376. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

378. “The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.”

— William Hazlitt

379. “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

380. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

386. “The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.”

— William Hazlitt

387. “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

388. “I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.”

— William Hazlitt

389. “The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.”

— William Hazlitt

390. “The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

393. “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

394. “The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.”

— William Hazlitt

395. “We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

397. “The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.”

— William Hazlitt

398. “Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.”

— 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 situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.”

— William Hazlitt