William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English writer, essayist, philosopher, and critic. Celebrated for his brilliant prose style, Hazlitt is one of the English language’s most outstanding and prolific authors—his remarkable essays fill 20 volumes.
Born in Maidstone, England, Hazlitt initially became a painter portrait and became a journalist and essayist for The Morning Chronicle and The Examiner. He wrote about art and sports, drama, politics, and reviewed books. He was an innovator in the development of the personal essay—the essay written in the first person, which is more discursive and is free to wander away from the central theme.
Hazlitt is considered one of the greatest exponents of the personal essay—written in the first person and often digressing from subject to subject. He was also one of the foremost critics of the early 19th century’s Romantic period and made original contributions to the appreciation of art, theatre, literature, and philosophy.
He was friends with Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and other luminaries now part of the 19th-century literary canon. Hazlitt died of stomach cancer in a London inn, penniless and uncelebrated.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Hazlitt
Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Humility, Modesty
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Envy, Jealousy
The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Power
To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Thinking
A coquette is one that is never to be persuaded out of the passion she has to please, nor out of a good opinion of her own beauty.—Time and years she regards as things that wrinkle and decay only other women; forgets that age is written in the face; and that the same dress which became her when young, now only makes her look the older.—Affectation cleaves to her even in sickness and pain, and she dies in a high head and colored ribbons.
—William Hazlitt
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Humankind, Action
There is some virtue in almost every vice except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is, at the same time, a compliment to it.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Hypocrisy
We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Imagination
Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as “spectacles” to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Learning
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understanding and our hearts.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Nature
True friendship is self-love at second hand.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Friendship
Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Taste, Style
The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Authority, Excellence, Fame
His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Letters
We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Sleep, One liners, Hypocrisy
A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer—that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Elegance is something more than ease—more than a freedom from awkwardness and restraint.—It implies a precision, a polish, and a sparkling which is spirited, yet delicate.
—William Hazlitt
Gallantry to women—the sure road to their favor—is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Courage, Bravery
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Deception, Deception/Lying
Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Prejudice
They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Actors, Acting
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Nature
Many persons in reasoning on the passions, make a continual appeal to commonsense. But passion is without commonsense, and we must frequently discard the one in speaking of the other.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Passion
Do you suppose we owe nothing to Pope’s deformity?—He said to himself “If my person be crooked, my verses shall be straight.”
—William Hazlitt
Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Friendship
To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Reason
Let a man’s talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Realization, Acceptance, Awareness
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties, Challenges
Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Tyranny
Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for—they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Media
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