Quotes from William Hazlitt

Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.

Principle is a passion for truth.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

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.

One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.

Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.

Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.

One truth discovered one pang of regret at not being able to express it is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.

Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.

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.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

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

To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.

True friendship is self-love at second-hand.

Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.

Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.

In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.

Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.

A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.

There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. 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.