William Hazlitt
Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.Collection: People
The multitude who require to be led, still hate their leaders.Collection: Leadership
The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.Collection: Hate
Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.Collection: Landscape Painting
Actors are the only honest hypocrites.Collection: Hypocrite
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.Collection: Death
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.Collection: Lying
Love may turn to indifference with possession.Collection: Love
Silence is one great art of conversation.Collection: Art
True friendship is self-love at second-hand.Collection: Friendship
Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.Collection: Running
The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.Collection: Men
The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.Collection: Power
Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.Collection: Order
Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.Collection: Acceptance
Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.Collection: Luxury
Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.Collection: Genius
The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.Collection: Ignorance
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.Collection: Writing
The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.Collection: Friendship
The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.Collection: Reading
Books wind into the heart.Collection: Book
To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.Collection: Kings
Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.Collection: Blow
Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.Collection: Animal
The look of a gentleman is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world.Collection: Reflection
Grace in women has more effect than beauty. We sometimes see a certain fine self-possession, an habitual voluptuousness of character, which reposes on its own sensations and derives pleasure from all around it, that is more irresistible than any other attraction. There is an air of languid enjoyment in such persons, "in their eyes, in their arms, and their hands, and their face," which robs us of ourselves, and draws us by a secret sympathy towards them.Collection: Character
Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?Collection: Believe
The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.Collection: Errors
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.Collection: Vanity
Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?Collection: Dark
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.Collection: Men
The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.Collection: Honesty
Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.Collection: Men
Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.Collection: Writing
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.Collection: Writing
Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.Collection: Genius
A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth.Collection: Air
People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.Collection: People
This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.Collection: Eye
That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.Collection: Education
Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.Collection: Pain
Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.Collection: Teacher
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.Collection: Triumph
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.Collection: Heart
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.Collection: Imagination
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.Collection: Men
In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.Collection: Views
The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.Collection: Men