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
antidote diffidence awkwardness
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
dream fame poet
Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.
art confused sight
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
anger fire spirit
The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.
anger kind spleen
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
cutting years age
There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.
mind dresses body
Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.
hypocrite men opposites
A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.
time sunny hours
Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).
passion men ruling
When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
evolution tendencies streams
A mighty stream of tendency.
real hypocrisy feelings
Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
opportunity giving faults
We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.
tired people attention
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.