William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism.
The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.
The miscreant Hazlitt continues, I have heard, his abuses of Southey, Coleridge and myself, in the Examiner. -- I hope that you do not associate with this Fellow, he is not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society, being the most perverse and malevolent Creature that ill luck has ever thrown in my way. Avoid him -- hic niger est -- And this, I understand, is the general opinion wherever he is known in London.
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.
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.
John Lamb (the brother of Charles) once knocked down Hazlitt, who was impertinent to him; and on those who were present interfering and begging Hazlitt to shake hands and forgive him, Hazlitt said, "Well, I don't care if I do. I am a metaphysician, and do not mind a blow; nothing but an idea hurts me.
Good temper is an estate for life…
Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
To be remembered after we are dead, is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.