Quotes from William Hazlitt

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken.

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

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

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

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.

When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country.

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself.

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn, and laughter.

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

Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence a vain man, in order that it may.

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust hatred alone is immortal.

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

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

The seat of knowledge is in the head, of wisdom, in the heart.

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.

If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.