Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

353. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

356. “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

357. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

364. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

367. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

369. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

373. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

376. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

379. “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

380. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

382. “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

383. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— 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. “Habit is necessary to give power.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

397. “To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.”

— William Hazlitt

398. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

400. “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