William Hazlitt Quotes

Good temper is an estate for life.

Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Leave me to my repose,’ is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to ‘take up his bed and walk,’ as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources ‘enfeebles all internal strength of thought,’ as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.

They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.

The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.

An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.

General principles are not the less true or important because, from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it, or like that secret influence which binds the world together and holds the planets in their orbits.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.

To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.

He understands the texture and meaning of the visible universe, and 'sees into the life of things,' not by the help of mechanical instruments, but of the improved exercise of his faculties, and an intimate sympathy with Nature. The meanest thing is not lost upon him, for he looks at it with an eye to itself, not merely to his own vanity or interest, or the opinion of the world. Even where there is neither beauty nor use — if that ever were — still there is truth, and a sufficient source of gratification in the indulgence of curiosity and activity of mind. The humblest printer is a true scholar; and the best of scholars - the scholar of Nature.

Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.

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

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little
of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion]