William Hazlitt
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.Collection: Art
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtakenCollection: Running
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".Collection: Harmony
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.Collection: Class
Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.Collection: Art
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.Collection: Thinking
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.Collection: Antidote
The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.Collection: Stars
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.Collection: Dignity
Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.Collection: Laughing
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.Collection: Greatness
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.Collection: Truth
When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face, – compare notes and chat the hour away.Collection: Reading