William Hazlitt

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

No young man believes he shalfever die.

Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.

Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.

A woman’s vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the God of her idolatry.

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.

The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.

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

A great mind is one that can forget or look beyond itself.

The measure of any man’s virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.

In what we really understand, we reason but little.

To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.

Political truth is a libel—religious truth blasphemy.

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.

Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.

The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.

The Way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures.

Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.

We prefer ourselves to others, only because w^e have a more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person’s.

Let a man’s talents or virtues be what thej' may, we only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.

He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.

Any one is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.

We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.

Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars—the scholar of nature.

It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.

Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.