William Hazlitt Quotes

“Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

— William Hazlitt

“If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.”

— William Hazlitt

“Zeal will do more than knowledge.”

— William Hazlitt

“You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.”

— William Hazlitt

“Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner
and then to thinking!”

— William Hazlitt

Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages"; and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, "with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned," that shine with an internal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought.

— William Hazlitt

“The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.”

— William Hazlitt

“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.”

— William Hazlitt

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

— William Hazlitt

“We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.”

— William Hazlitt

The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.

— William Hazlitt

“A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.”

— William Hazlitt

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

— William Hazlitt

“We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.”

— William Hazlitt

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

— William Hazlitt

To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

— William Hazlitt

“I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.”

— William Hazlitt

“People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.”

— William Hazlitt

“Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.”

— William Hazlitt

We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.

— William Hazlitt

“Actors are the only honest hypocrites.”

— William Hazlitt

“Hope is the best possession.”

— William Hazlitt

“Greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.”

— William Hazlitt

“I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.”

— William Hazlitt

“To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.”

— William Hazlitt

“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.”

— William Hazlitt

“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.”

— William Hazlitt

“Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.”

— William Hazlitt

“We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.”

— William Hazlitt

“When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.”

— William Hazlitt

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.

— William Hazlitt

“An honest man is respected by all parties.”

— William Hazlitt

“That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.”

— William Hazlitt

“The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.”

— William Hazlitt

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.

— William Hazlitt

“As a general rule, those who are dissatisfied with themselves will seek to go out of themselves into an ideal world. Persons in strong health and spirits, who take plenty of air and exercise, who are "in favor with, their stars," and have a thorough relish of the good things of this life, seldom devote themselves in despair to religion or the muses. Sedentary, nervous, hypochondriacal people, on the contrary, are forced, for want of an appetite for the real and substantial, to look out for a more airy food and speculative comforts.”

— William Hazlitt

“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.”

— William Hazlitt

It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.

— William Hazlitt

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.

— William Hazlitt

“We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.”

— William Hazlitt

“Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.”

— William Hazlitt

“The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.”

— William Hazlitt

“If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.”

— William Hazlitt

“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.”

— William Hazlitt

“The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.”

— William Hazlitt

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

— William Hazlitt

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.

— William Hazlitt

The soul of dispatch is decision.

— William Hazlitt

“A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.”

— William Hazlitt

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.

— William Hazlitt