William Hazlitt
Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.Collection: Prejudice
Malice often takes the garb of truth.Collection: Evil
A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.Collection: Journey
The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.Collection: Silence
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?Collection: Death
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.Collection: Thinking
Dandyism is a species of genius.Collection: Genius
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.Collection: Death
Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.Collection: Wise
We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.Collection: Cooperation
To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.Collection: Evil
The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.Collection: Art
Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before ithas had time to reconcile its feelings to the change in circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere sur prise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances.Collection: Laughter
To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.Collection: Ideas
A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.Collection: Silence
A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.Collection: Fashion
We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.Collection: Spirit
We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.Collection: Littles
Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.Collection: Funny
A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without themCollection: Greatness
Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.Collection: Money
I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.Collection: Enemy
Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.Collection: Family
The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.Collection: Men
There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass ""no day without a line""-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.Collection: Art
Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.Collection: Believe
The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.Collection: Art
The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.Collection: Thinking
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.Collection: Pain
Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.Collection: Our Words
Love at first sight is only realizing an imagination that has always haunted us; or meeting with a face, a figure, or cast of expression in perfection that we have seen and admired in a less degree or in less favorable circumstances a hundred times before.Collection: Sight
A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.Collection: Vulgarity Is
You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.Collection: College
All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.Collection: Landscape
We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.Collection: Vanity
It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.Collection: Exercise
The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.Collection: Women
It is well there is no one without fault; for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to s different species.Collection: Optimistic
Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.Collection: Humanity
Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.Collection: Power
An honest man is respected by all parties.Collection: Honesty
Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.Collection: Nature
There is evil poured upon the earth from the overflowings of corruption-- Sickness, and poverty, and pain, and guilt, and madness, and sorrow; But, as the water from a fountain riseth and sinketh to its level, Ceaselessly toileth justice to equalize the lots of men.Collection: Pain
Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are 'the best of kings'. It is their power, their splendour, it is the apprehension of the personal consequences of their favour or their hatred that dazzles the imagination and suspends the judgement of their favourites or their vassals; but death cancels the bond of allegiance and of interest; and seen AS THEY WERE, their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous.Collection: Kings
The essence of poetry is will and passion.Collection: Passion
A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.Collection: Love
They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.Collection: Life
When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.Collection: Love