William Hazlitt

The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

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.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

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

There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.

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?

None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.

Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.

Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.