William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism. He is sometimes esteemed the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson.

See also: Table-Talk

• The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
  • Review of Lord Byron's Childe Harold in Yellow Dwarf (2 May 1818), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover (1902-1904)

• Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
  • "Thoughts on Taste", Edinburgh Magazine (July 1819), final paragraph

• We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
  • "Thoughts on Taste," Edinburgh Magazine, (October 1818), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)

• Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
  • "On The Conduct of Life" (1822), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)

• Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.
  • "On The Conduct of Life" (1822)

• You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
  • "On The Conduct of Life" (1822)

• The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
  • "Common Places," No. 1, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)

• A scholar is like a book written in a dead language — it is not every one that can read in it.
  • "Common Places," No. 13, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

• I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
  • "Common Places," No. 60, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

• Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols — it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
  • "Common Places," No. 76, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

• Man is a make-believe animal — he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
  • Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1824), ch. XVI

• If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power, for you necessarily feel some towards him; and since he will take no denial, you must comply with his peremptory demands, or send for a constable, which out of respect for his character you will not do.
  • "On The Want Of Money," Monthly Magazine (January 1827), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)

• Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for — they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
  • "The Modern Gradus ad Parnassum," London Weekly Review (17 May 1828), reprinted in New Writings by William Hazlitt (1925), edited by P. P. Howe

• The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
  • "American Literature — Dr. Channing," Edinburgh Review, (October 1829), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)

• The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
  • Burke and the Edinburgh Phrenologists in The Atlas (15 February 1829); reprinted in New Writings by William Hazlitt, William Hazlitt and Percival Presland Howe (ed.), (2nd edition, 1925), p. 117; also reprinted in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, Volume 20: Miscellaneous writings, (J.M. Dent and Sons, 1934), (AMS Press, 1967), p. 201

• When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
  • "On The Spirit of Controversy," The Atlas (30 January 1830), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)

• Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
  • "The Sick Chamber," The New Monthly Magazine (August 1830), reprinted in Essays of William Hazlitt, selected and edited by Frank Carr (London, 1889)

• Well, I've had a happy life.
  • Last words (18 September 1830), quoted by his grandson, William Carew Hazlitt, in Memoirs of William Hazlitt (1867) vol. II, p. 238

• General principles are not the less true or important because, from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it, or like that secret influence which binds the world together and holds the planets in their orbits.
  • "Edmund Burke"

• The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.
  • "On the Literary Character" (28 October 1813)

• They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.
  • "On Actors and Acting" (The Examiner, 5 January 1817)

• There is a natural tendency in sects to narrow the mind.
  The extreme stress laid upon differences of minor importance, to the neglect of more general truths and broader views of things, gives an inverted bias to the understanding; and this bias is continually increased by the eagerness of controversy, and captious hostility to the prevailing system. A party-feeling of this kind once formed will insensibly communicate itself to other topics; and will be too apt to lead its votaries to a contempt for the opinions of others, a jealousy of every difference of sentiment, and a disposition to arrogate all sound principle as well as understanding to themselves, and those who think with them. We can readily conceive how such persons, from fixing too high a value on the practical pledge which they have given of the independence and sincerity of their opinions, come at last to entertain a suspicion of every one else as acting under the shackles of prejudice or the mask of hypocrisy. All those who have not given in their unqualified protest against received doctrines and established authority, are supposed to labour under an acknowledged incapacity to form a rational determination on any subject whatever. Any argument, not having the presumption of singularity in its favour, is immediately set aside as nugatory. There is, however, no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice. For this last implies not only the practical conviction that it is right, but the theoretical assumption that it cannot be wrong. From considering all objections as in this manner "null and void,” the mind becomes so thoroughly satisfied with its own conclusions, as to render any farther examination of them superfluous, and confounds its exclusive pretensions to reason with the absolute possession of it.
  • "On the Tendency of Sects"

• Grace has been defined the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
  • "On Manner"

• Grace in women has more effect than beauty.
  • "On Manner"

• Grace is the absence of every thing that indicates pain or difficulty, or hesitation or incongruity.
  • "On Beauty"

• All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.

• 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.

• 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, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances.

• The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakespeare, every thing.

• The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of dead men.

• He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.

• The love of fame, as it enters at times into his mind, is only another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority — that of time.

Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819)

• I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man : I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal courage, and would soon leave a man in a very formidable minority.
  • ""Preface"

• The Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries long life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side — the side of corruption and prerogative.
  • "Preface"

• Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
  • "On the Clerical Character" (January/February 1818)

• It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
  • "On Court-Influence" (January 3/January 10, 1818)

• We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion.
  • "On Court-Influence" (January 3/January 10, 1818)

• The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
  • "The Times Newspaper"

• Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
  • "On Wit and Humour"

• Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.
  • "On Wit and Humour"

• Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
  • "On Wit and Humour"

• Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.
  • "On Wit and Humour"

• Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
  • "On Wit and Humour"

Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

• Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
  • No. 2

• 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.
  • No. 19

• Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope; and few are reduced so low as that.
  • No. 34

• Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.
  • No. 35

• The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
  • No. 43

• There are names written in her immortal scroll, at which FAME blushes!
  • No. 53

• The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
  • No. 54

• There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is as they please or displease us.
  • No. 60

• It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.
  • No. 66

• Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
  • No. 72

• The public have neither shame or gratitude.
  • No. 85

• Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
  • No. 87

• As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
  • No. 89

• Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
  • No. 101

• The truly proud man knows neither superiors nor inferiors. The first he does not admit of: the last he does not concern himself about.
  • No. 112

• 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.
  • No. 132

• Unlimited power is helpless, as arbitrary power is capricious. Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We can attempt nothing great, but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter: we can persevere in nothing great, but from a pride in overcoming them.
  • No. 156

• One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
  • No. 162

• To a superior race of beings the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem equally ridiculous.
  • No. 191

• The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
  • No. 257

• If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
  • No. 302

• Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
  • No. 305

• The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.
  • No. 330

• The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
  • No. 333

• We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
  • No. 364

• A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one — they shew one another off to the best advantage.
  • No. 376

• An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
  • No. 387

• Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.
  • No. 388

• Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity, who drink of that flood of glory as of a river, and refresh our wings in it for future flight.
  • No. 389

• He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
  • No. 401

• The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
  • No. 402

• Those who can command themselves, command others.
  • No. 407

• Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
  • No. 413

• Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel.
  • No. 416

• To be remembered after we are dead, is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
  • No. 429

• This Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious.
  • "William Gifford" [1]

• One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
  • "Jeremy Bentham [2]

• The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
  • "Mr. Brougham — Sir F. Burdett" [3]

• The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
  • "On Envy"

• For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.
  • "On the Pleasure of Hating" (c. 1826)

• If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
  • "On the Pleasure of Hating"

• We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
  • "On Application to Study"

• Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
  • "On Application to Study"

• No really great man ever thought himself so.
  • "Whether Genius is Conscious of its Powers?"

• Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.
  • "Whether Genius is Conscious of its Powers?"

• He who comes up to his own idea of greatness, must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
  • "Whether Genius is Conscious of its Powers?"

• Zeal will do more than knowledge.
  • "On the Difference Between Writing and Speaking"

• To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it…
  • "On the Difference Between Writing and Speaking"

• 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.
  • "On the Spirit of Obligations" (1824)

• The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favour.
  • "On the Spirit of Obligations"

• Good temper is an estate for life…
  • "On Personal Character" (1821)

• So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
  • "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (1822)

• Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
  • "On Old English Writers and Speakers" (1825)

• The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public.
  • "On the Qualifications Necessary for Success"

• We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
  • "On Dreams"

• We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.
  • "On Dreams"

• A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
  • "On the Look of a Gentleman"

• Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.
  • "Mind and Motive"

• To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.
  • "A Farewell to Essay-Writing" (March 1828)

• If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
  • "On Reading New Books" (1825)

• Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
  • "On the Conversations of Lords," New Monthly Magazine (April 1826)

• Horus non numero nisi serenas—"I count only the hours that are serene"—is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled.
  • "On a Sun-Dial" (New Monthly Magazine, October 1827)

• Gallantry to women (the sure road to their favor) is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it.
  • "On Disagreeable People" (August 1827)

• But there is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
  • "On Disagreeable People"

• Indeed some degree of affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
  • "On Cant and Hypocrisy", London Weekly Review, (6 December 1828)

• We all wear some disguise — make some professions — use some artifice to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom, though we may endeavour to keep some others that we think less to our credit as much as possible in the background…
  • "On Cant and Hypocrisy"

• The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be as constantly wound up.
  • "On Cant and Hypocrisy"

• Again, there is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have also their altars and their religion.
  • "On Cant and Hypocrisy"

• Prejudice is the child of ignorance…
  • "On Prejudice"

• We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
  • "On Prejudice"

• Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
  • "On Prejudice"

• Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.
  • "On Prejudice"

• A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man.
  • "On Nicknames"

• But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath — tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
  • "On Fashion"

• The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
  • "On Knowledge of the World"

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

• His manners are to 99 in 100 singularly repulsive—; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange. … he is, I verily believe, kindly-nature; is very of, attentive to, and patient with children; but he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable pride — and addicted to women, as objects of sexual indulgence.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter to Thomas Wedgwood (1803), in Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (1932)

• If Samuel Johnson was the more deliberate aphorist, Hazlitt was the more self-conscious literary architect. You quote lines from Johnson; you want to recite entire passages from Hazlitt.
  • Arthur Krystal, in The New Yorker (18 May 2009), p. 74

• John Lamb (the brother of Charles) once knocked down Hazlitt, who was impertinent to him; and on those who were present interfering and begging Hazlitt to shake hands and forgive him, Hazlitt said, "Well, I don't care if I do. I am a metaphysician, and do not mind a blow; nothing but an idea hurts me."
  • Thomas Moore, in his Journal (9 September 1820), vol. III, p. 146

• The miscreant Hazlitt continues, I have heard, his abuses of Southey, Coleridge and myself, in the Examiner. — I hope that you do not associate with this Fellow, he is not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society, being the most perverse and malevolent Creature that ill luck has ever thrown in my way. Avoid him — hic niger est — And this, I understand, is the general opinion wherever he is known in London.
  • William Wordsworth, in a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon (7 April 1817), in Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth, ed. M.L. Peacock (1950)

• Works by William Hazlitt at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Hazlitt at the Internet Archive
• "A Memorial for Hazlitt" by A.C. Grayling, The Guardian (21 April 2001)
• "Spirit of the Age" by Tom Paulin, The Guardian (5 April 2003)
• "Jazzing Up Hazlitt" by James Fenton, The New York Review of Books (July 2009)
• "William Hazlitt" BBC Radio 4 : In Our Time programme (8 April 2010)