William Hazlitt
Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.Collection: Life
Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.Collection: Liars
Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.Collection: Public Opinion
Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.Collection: Betrayal
The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.Collection: Religion
A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.Collection: Thinking
If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.Collection: Peace
A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.Collection: Life
He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight.Collection: Moon
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.Collection: Journey
Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.Collection: Air
Gallantry to women - the sure road to their favor - is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward itCollection: Confidence
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.Collection: Happiness
Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?Collection: Government
Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.Collection: Kings
The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.Collection: Friendship
Well I've had a happy life.Collection: Life
An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.Collection: Doe
The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.Collection: Retirement
The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.Collection: Imagination
Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.Collection: Pleasure
Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.Collection: Men
There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.Collection: Mind
The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.Collection: Lasts
To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.Collection: Men
In what we really understand, we reason but little.Collection: Understanding
Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.Collection: Book
There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.Collection: Character
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.Collection: Fear Of Death
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.Collection: Funny
Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.Collection: Causes
A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.Collection: Moving
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.Collection: Inspirational
The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.Collection: Beauty
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.Collection: Character
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.Collection: Business
Despair swallows up cowardice.Collection: Despair
Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.Collection: Pride
Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.Collection: Men
The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.Collection: Mind
Elegance is something more than ease; it is more than a freedom from awkwardness or restraint. It implies, I conceive, a precision, a polish, a sparkling, spirited yet delicate.Collection: Ease
It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.Collection: Thinking
We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.Collection: Life
What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one know there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.Collection: Mean
Good temper is an estate for life.Collection: Life
When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.Collection: Passion
Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.Collection: Nice
Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.Collection: Men
Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.Collection: Atmosphere