Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.”

— William Hazlitt

357. “Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.”

— William Hazlitt

358. “Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.”

— William Hazlitt

359. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

373. “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

374. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

377. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

380. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

383. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

387. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

395. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt