QUOTES by William Hazlitt
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
The world judge of men by their ability in their professions, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is on that on which our success in life depends
Quote by -William Hazlitt
The young are prodigal of life from a superabundance of it; the old are tenacious on the same score, because they have little left, and cannot enjoy even what remains of it.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
Quote by -William Hazlitt
What a fine lesson is conveyed to the mind -- to take no note of time but by its benefits, to watch only for the smiles and neglect the frowns of fate, to compose our lives of bright and gentle moments, turning always to the sunny side of things, and letting the rest slip for our imaginations, unheeded or forgotten! How different from the common art of self-tormenting!
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
Quote by -William Hazlitt
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.
Quote by -William Hazlitt