William Hazlitt Quotes

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits.

Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction — they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.

Repose is necessary to great efforts, and he who is never idle, labours in vain!

Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.

Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills

The whole art of training consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise, repeated alternately without end.

"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 only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]"

One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel.

Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.

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

We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in nostrums, but are willing to see ourselves whether there is any truth in them.

The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.

Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.