James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Hazlitt
Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolonging of a real sentiment.
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people’s weaknesses.
Death puts an end to all rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.
Elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman, dignity is proper to noblemen, and majesty to kings.
Envy is littleness of soul.
Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism.
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.
Faith is necessary to victory.
Fashion begins and ends in two things it abhors most—singularity and vulgarity.
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid to be overtaken by it. It is a sign that the two things are not far asunder.
Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.
Grace has been defined the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
Grace in women has more effect than beauty.
Great acts grow out of great occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society and tearing it up by the roots.
Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
Habit is necessary to give power.
He who comes up to his own ideal of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
I am always afraid of a fool; one cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
In love we never think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
It is well that there is no one without a fault, for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species.
Life is the art of being well deceived.
Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel.
Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else.
Mere sensibility is not true taste, but sensibility to real excellence is.
No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.
No really great man ever thought himself so.
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.
Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it.
Our strength lies in our weakness (i.e., limitedness).
Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman.
Poetry is right royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many.
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
Public opinion is the mixed result of the intellect of the community acting upon general feeling.
Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spencer, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakespeare, everything.
The essence of poetry is will and passion.
The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters.
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.
The public have neither shame nor gratitude.
The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel aright.
Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.
Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigour, and not by patient, wary steps.
To be young is to be as one of the immortals.
To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant.
Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel aright.
We do not die wholly at our deaths; we have mouldered away gradually long before.
We may give more offence by our silence than even by impertinence.
We talk little if we do not talk about ourselves.