Quotes from William Hazlitt

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

Repose is necessary to great efforts, and he who is never idle, labours in vain!

Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

No really great man ever thought himself so.

The common-place critic . . . believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion ]

El hombre es el único animal que ríe y llora; porque él es el único que conoce la diferencia entre las cosas que son y las que debieran ser.

He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else.

Anyone who has passed through 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.

Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told.

Todo aquello que se encuentra fuera del alcance del sentido y del conocimiento, todo aquello que se percibe defectuosamente, la imaginación lo recompone a su antojo; y todo menos el momento presente, menos el lugar presente, la pasión lo reclama para sí, lo incuba con las alas extendidas y le imprime su propia imagen. La pasión es dueña del espacio infinito y los objetos distantes nos gustan porque limitan con sus confines y se moldean con su contacto.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.

It should seem as if there were a few green sunny spots in the desert of life, to which we are always hastening forward: we eye them wistfully in the distance, and care not what perils or suffering we endure, so that we arrive at them at last.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I shall not be able to find my way across the room, nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.

Infinite are the mortifications of the bare attempt to emerge from obscurity; numberless the failures; and greater and more galling still the vicissitudes and tormenting accompaniments of success.

Good temper is an estate for life.

The grandeur of [great artists] works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.

The whole art of training consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise, repeated alternately without end.

A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.