Quotes from William Hazlitt

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.

Reason, with most people, means their own opinions.

The soul of dispatch is decision.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: The one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.

Faith is necessary to victory.

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

It is well there is no one without fault; for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species.

We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.

We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.

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.

He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.