Quotes by William Hazlitt

About William Hazlitt:

William Hazlitt is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is currently little read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

William Hazlitt

Dandyism is a variety of genius.

William Hazlitt

Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

William Hazlitt

Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.

William Hazlitt

We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.

William Hazlitt

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

William Hazlitt

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

The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.

William Hazlitt

We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.

William Hazlitt

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

William Hazlitt

Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.

William Hazlitt

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an means.

William Hazlitt

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the ima...

William Hazlitt

I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the report of it...

William Hazlitt

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequen...

William Hazlitt

Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since

William Hazlitt

Never so sure our rapture to create As when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.

William Hazlitt

The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

William Hazlitt

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. (1778 - 1830)

William Hazlitt

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 only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]

William Hazlitt

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, ]

William Hazlitt

Author Bio

  • NameWilliam Hazlitt
  • DescriptionEnglish writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, as the greatest art critic of his age, and as a drama critic, social commentator, and philosopher
  • BornApril 10, 1778
  • DiedSeptember 18, 1830
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionLiterary Historian; Philosopher; Writer
  • WorksCharacters Of Shakespear's Plays; Table-Talk; The Spirit Of The Age