Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.”

— William Hazlitt

352. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

354. “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

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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

360. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

363. “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

364. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

371. “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

372. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

381. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

384. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

387. “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

388. “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

389. “What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.”

— William Hazlitt

390. “The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.”

— William Hazlitt

391. “No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

393. “Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

395. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

397. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt