William Hazlitt Quotes

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it…

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness, must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

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

This Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious.

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

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

Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.