809 Quotes by William Hazlitt

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

A woman’s vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.

The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics – mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

I’m not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer – that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person’s.

A man’s reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.

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.