Quotes By William Hazlitt

We must be doing something to be happy.

No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.

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

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

Reflection makes men cowards.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

Gracefulness has been defined to be the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.

The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

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!

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.

A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.

There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.

To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

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

The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.