Quotes By William Hazlitt

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

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.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

Dandyism is a variety of genius.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

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

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

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

Reflection makes men cowards.

We must be doing something to be happy.

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

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

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

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.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

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

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!

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.