William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt
William Hazlittwas an English writer, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age. Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth10 April 1778
spring office anxiety
A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
sports hate despise
We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
hate self-hate despise
By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
men hands years
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.
imagination taste receiving
Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
reality greatness way
The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
unjust public-opinion opinion
Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
fashion clothes issues
Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
fashion clothes trying
What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
death dying consciousness
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
facts indifference wit
Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
education teaching rewards
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
blessing past people
It has been the resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age, ever threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements - not (as is pretended) the chimerical anticipation of possible advantages, but the intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and growing abuses.
passion wings space
Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch.