William Hazlitt
Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people.Collection: Government
I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like, grave or gay, black, brown, or fair; with golden tresses or raven locks; - and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck.Collection: Love
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.Collection: Sarcasm
We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.Collection: Men
We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.Collection: Thinking
The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.Collection: Breathing
From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.Collection: Looks
The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.Collection: Relief
The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.Collection: Business
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.Collection: Wise
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.Collection: Pride
Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.Collection: Men
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.Collection: Truth
It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.Collection: Grief
Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.Collection: Dream
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.Collection: Wise
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.Collection: Justice
Asleep, nobody is a hypocriteCollection: Hypocrite
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.Collection: Art
Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.Collection: Giving
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.Collection: Littles
The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.Collection: Money
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.Collection: Tired
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.Collection: Delight
You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.Collection: Mean
Faith is necessary to victory.Collection: Victory
Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.Collection: Distance
We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.Collection: Tired
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.Collection: Sacrifice
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.Collection: Thinking
If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.Collection: Peace
Popularity disarms envy in well-disposed minds. Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others who feel that the world has done them justice. When success has not this effect in opening the mind, it is a sign that it has been ill deserved.Collection: Envy
Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.Collection: Honesty
Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.Collection: Passion
The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.Collection: Vices
No really great man ever thought himself so.Collection: Men
Words are the only things that last for ever.Collection: Book
Envy is littleness of soul.Collection: Envy
It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.Collection: Heart
Do not quarrel with the world too soon; for, bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in, here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago.Collection: Long Ago
We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.Collection: Attachment
Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.Collection: Men
Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.Collection: Honesty
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: Book
So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.Collection: Life
While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.Collection: Desire
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.Collection: Nature
The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.Collection: Ignorance
The more a man writes, the more he can write.Collection: Writing