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
If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Peace
No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Modesty, Humility
Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: War
I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging 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.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Water
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Identity
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. We cannot force love.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Love
Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Family, Birth
There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Ignorance, Talking, Defects
Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Conversation
The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart.—We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel right.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Judgment
Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Justice
Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Poverty
We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Hypocrisy, One liners, Sleep
Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Affectation
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Anxiety, Fear
The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: The Mind, Mind
Silence is one great art of conversation.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Conversation
If you think you can win, you can. Faith is necessary to victory.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Faith, Victory, Belief
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.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Punctuality
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
There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Prejudice
Of all virtues magnanimity is the rarest; there are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Generosity
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Career
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.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Friendship
There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking about being genteel.
—William Hazlitt
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.—It is a sign the two things are not far asunder.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Fashion
There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Fame
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Perspective, Custom
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
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Challenges, Learning, Adversity
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