Top 500 William Hazlitt Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

403. “Habit is necessary to give power.”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

405. “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

406. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

408. “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

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

— William Hazlitt

410. “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

411. “Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.”

— William Hazlitt

412. “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

413. “It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.”

— William Hazlitt

414. “The look of a gentleman is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world.”

— William Hazlitt

415. “Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.”

— William Hazlitt

416. “The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant – without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others – and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.”

— William Hazlitt

417. “Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him.”

— William Hazlitt

418. “Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.”

— William Hazlitt

419. “I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it. He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends, or to accomplish a useful object.”

— William Hazlitt

420. “It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.”

— William Hazlitt

421. “We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.”

— William Hazlitt

422. “The multitude who require to be led, still hate their leaders.”

— William Hazlitt

423. “People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.”

— William Hazlitt

424. “The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.”

— William Hazlitt

425. “A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.”

— William Hazlitt

426. “Popularity disarms envy in well-disposed minds. Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others who feel that the world has done them justice. When success has not this effect in opening the mind, it is a sign that it has been ill deserved.”

— William Hazlitt

427. “A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.”

— William Hazlitt

428. “Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.”

— William Hazlitt

429. “Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.”

— William Hazlitt

430. “The youth is better than the old age of friendship.”

— William Hazlitt

431. “Keep your misfortunes to yourself.”

— William Hazlitt

432. “A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.”

— William Hazlitt

433. “An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.”

— William Hazlitt

434. “A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.”

— William Hazlitt

435. “Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.”

— William Hazlitt

436. “There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which, we often yield as to a resistless power; nor can he reasonably expect, the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.”

— William Hazlitt

437. “As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.”

— William Hazlitt

438. “Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.”

— William Hazlitt

439. “A thought must tell at once, or not at all.”

— William Hazlitt

440. “None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.”

— William Hazlitt

441. “A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.”

— William Hazlitt

442. “He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to an end of his wealth.”

— William Hazlitt

443. “A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.”

— William Hazlitt

444. “We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.”

— William Hazlitt

445. “Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for – they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?”

— William Hazlitt

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

— William Hazlitt

447. “We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.”

— William Hazlitt

448. “We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.”

— William Hazlitt

449. “The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.”

— William Hazlitt

450. “We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves; yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance.”

— William Hazlitt