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Peace
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
-William Hazlitt
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Perfection
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
-William Hazlitt
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Persuasion
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
-William Hazlitt
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Poetry
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The essence of poetry is will and passion.
-William Hazlitt
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Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
-William Hazlitt
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The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
-William Hazlitt
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Politics
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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
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Power
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If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
-William Hazlitt
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Prejudice
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The most learned are often the most narrow minded.
-William Hazlitt
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There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
-William Hazlitt
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No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
-William Hazlitt
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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.
-William Hazlitt
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Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
-William Hazlitt
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Promises
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Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
-William Hazlitt
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Public
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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
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Punctuality
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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
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Reading
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
-William Hazlitt
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Reason
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To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
-William Hazlitt
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Reflection
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Reflection makes men cowards.
-William Hazlitt
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Religion
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A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.
-William Hazlitt
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Rest, Leisure
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The busier we are the more leisure we have.
-William Hazlitt
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Ridicule
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We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
-William Hazlitt
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Scholars, Scholarship
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A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
-William Hazlitt
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Self Respect
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The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.
-William Hazlitt
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Sincerity
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There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
-William Hazlitt
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Books by and about William Hazlitt