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
love envy justice
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
love life hands
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
art knowledge people
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
regret ideas lasts
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
running believe men
His hypothesis goes to this - to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.
pride encounters resistance
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
sympathy determined sensibility
We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility
sympathy perfect indifference
Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
power delicacy persons
If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
nature book faces
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
knowledge zeal
Zeal will do more than knowledge.
ignorance knowledge science
The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
jealousy space envy
Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
being-happy
We must be doing something to be happy.