Book detail: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated) is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This illustrated volume includes a selection of essays, reviews, and literary criticism by the 19th-century English writer William Hazlitt. The collection showcases his wit, insight, and influence on English literature.
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“Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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!”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The more we do, the more we can do.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Grace in women has more effect than beauty.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
“When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)