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William Hazlitt Quotes - Page 21

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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

William Hazlitt
Vices, Wells, Employed
William Hazlitt, William Shakespeare (1848). “Characters of Shakespeare's Plays”, p.40

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
People, Vices, Resources
William Hazlitt (1871). “The Round Table. A collection of Essays ... By W. H. and Leigh Hunt”, p.497

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
Air, Understanding, Feelings
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1468, Delphi Classics

The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.

William Hazlitt
Foul, Nations
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1248, Delphi Classics

Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.

William Hazlitt
Family, Running, Blood
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.2020, Delphi Classics

Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

William Hazlitt
Friendship, Meat, Cold
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1919, Delphi Classics

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.

William Hazlitt
Men, Power, Tyrants
William Hazlitt (1819). “Political essays, with sketches of public characters”, p.163

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

William Hazlitt
Men, Thinking, Young
William Hazlitt (1845). “Table Talk: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things”, p.127

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
Struggle, Passion, Mind
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.744, Delphi Classics

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.

William Hazlitt
Laughter, Feelings, Mind
William Hazlitt (1845). “Lectures on the English Comic Writers”, p.2

Habit is necessary to give power.

William Hazlitt
Giving, Habit
William Hazlitt (1870). “The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things”, p.432

A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.

William Hazlitt
Advantage, Should, Graves
William Hazlitt (1837). “Characteristics: in the manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims [by W. Hazlitt].”, p.137

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
Funny, Humour, Wit
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.670, Delphi Classics

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.

William Hazlitt
Art, Past, Achievement
'The Spirit of the Age' (1825) 'Mr Coleridge'

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.

William Hazlitt
Believe, Tyrants, Humanity
William Hazlitt (1848). “The Miscellaneous Works”, p.181

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.

William Hazlitt
Art, Book, Library

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

William Hazlitt
Genius, Talent, Capacity

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

William Hazlitt
Beauty Everywhere, Refinement, Spectators

Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.

William Hazlitt
Rewards, Fruit, Speak
William Hazlitt (1859). “Table talk”, p.198

The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.

William Hazlitt
Titles, Lasts, Catchers
William Hazlitt (1822). “Table-talk: Or, Original Essays”, p.143

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.

William Hazlitt
Exercise, Opportunity, Thinking
"Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners". Book by William Hazlitt. Chapter: "On Will-Making", 1822.

All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.

William Hazlitt
Landscape, Void, Form
Of Turner's painting, quoted in J Lindsay Turner: The Man and his Art (1985).

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
College, Oxford, London
'Table Talk' vol. 1 (1821) 'The Ignorance of the Learned'

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.

William Hazlitt
Vanity, Merit, Opinion
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1466, Delphi Classics

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

William Hazlitt
Vanity, Admiration, Driven
William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1481, Delphi Classics

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