Quotes from William Hazlitt

I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

We often repent the good we have done as well as the ill.

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.

One has no notion of him [William Cobbett] as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers…. He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and the practical malignity of man.

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it…. It is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things;… to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.

Anyone who has passed though 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.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.

When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!

His sayings are generally like women's letters; all the pith is in the postscript.

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath -- tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.

Lest he should wander irretrievably from the right path, he stands still.

Man is a make-believe animal - he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was time when we were not this gives us no concern -- why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be

The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.

The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

The more we do, the more we can do.