William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism.
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man.
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
Prejudice is the child of ignorance…
There is, however, no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it…
The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
Man is a make-believe animal — he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.
Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
General principles are not the less true or important because, from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it, or like that secret influence which binds the world together and holds the planets in their orbits.
Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are. They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot understand this at all. What is the use of a man's always revolving round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it himself, as well as tire other people.
An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.