William Hazlitt Quotes

516 quotes in 4096 categories

• Violence ever defeats its own ends. Where you cannot drive you can always persuade. A gentle word, a kind look, a god-natured smile can work…
• The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism…
• He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
• The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they…
• There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
• I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
• A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
• Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.
• To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.
• Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
• The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and…
• Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
• First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions…
• By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
• We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
• A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
• It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.
• Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them…
• Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
• Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.

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