William Hazlitt Quotes

"To be happy, we must be true to nature, and carry our age along with us"

"The youth is better than the old age of friendship."

"The worst old age is that of the mind."

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

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it."

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."

"We must be doing something to be happy."

"Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity."

"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."

"Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity."

"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes the edge off admiration"

"A wise traveler never despises his own country."

"It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse."

"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."

"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"

"We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts."

"Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life."

"Rules and models destroy genius and art."

"Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated."

"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."