William Hazlitt
What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.Collection: Light
In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.Collection: Thinking
Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.Collection: Confidence
People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.Collection: People
When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.Collection: Country
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.Collection: Journey
A great mind is one that can forget or look beyond itself.Collection: Mind
We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.Collection: Giving
People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!Collection: Love
Poverty, when it is voluntary, is never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect.Collection: Poverty
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.Collection: Stupid
True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.Collection: True Friend
It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.Collection: Book
[Science is] the desire to know causes.Collection: Science
Love and joy are twins or born of each other.Collection: Love
We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.Collection: Eye
It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.Collection: Hate
Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.Collection: Taste
We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibilityCollection: Sympathy
Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.Collection: Needs
Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.Collection: Life
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.Collection: Titles
In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.Collection: Art
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.Collection: Knowing
A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.Collection: Men
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.Collection: Inspirational
Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.Collection: Names
I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.Collection: Hate
With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.Collection: Country
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.Collection: Inspirational
He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.Collection: Work
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.Collection: Wise
Abuse is an indirect species of homage.Collection: Abuse
The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.Collection: Thinking
Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism; and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.Collection: Children
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.Collection: Hate
We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!Collection: Life
Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.Collection: Lying
Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.Collection: Moving
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.Collection: Men
We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.Collection: Inspirational
If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will -the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.Collection: Names
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it. He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends, or to accomplish a useful object.Collection: Mind
The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.Collection: Common Sense
Who likes not his business, his business likes not him.Collection: Success
We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.Collection: Reading
A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.Collection: Men
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.Collection: Writing
To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.Collection: Self