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
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
A knave thinks himself a fool all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
—William Hazlitt
An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself.
—William Hazlitt
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
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, Fame, Excellence
We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Speakers
His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Letters
The temple of fame stands upon the grave; the flame upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of the dead.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Fame
Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Ability
As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Mindsets, Assurance, Confidence, Optimism
If we use no ceremory toward others, we shall be treated without any.—People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
—William Hazlitt
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; and the height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. They wear the livery of other men’s fortunes: their very thoughts are not their own.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Acting, Actors
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
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Stupidity
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Career
A wise traveler never despises his own country.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Travel
As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Hypocrisy, Lies
To be happy, we must be true to nature, and carry our age along with us.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Age, Time
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
It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play. We uniformly applaud what is right, and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
—William Hazlitt
No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Posterity, Greatness
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 few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please—that is, as they please or displease us.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Friendship
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 art of pleasing consists in being pleased. To be amiable is to be satisfied with one’s self and others.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Pleasing, Persuasion
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Happiness
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred—it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the dropsy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust—the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Death, Dying
We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Hypocrisy, One liners, Sleep
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.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Appearance
Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Affectation
It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Adversity
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Public
The public have neither shame or gratitude.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Gratitude
We may give more offense by our silence than even by impertinence.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Silence
A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Desires, Success, Desire, Enthusiasm, Passion
We often choose a friend as we do a mistress, for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Friendship
Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Excellence, Genius, Career
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Giving, Service, Kindness
Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end, or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves.—It is partly practice and partly habit.—It requires an effort in them to speak the truth.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Lying
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
—William Hazlitt
Topics: Humor, Wit
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