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
speak virtue ill
The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.
evolution tendencies streams
A mighty stream of tendency.
rewards fruit speak
Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
truth substance immortal
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
landscape void form
All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
lasts titles volume
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.
facts indifference wit
Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
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.
anger kind spleen
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
anger fire spirit
The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.
dream fame poet
Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.
antidote diffidence awkwardness
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
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.
beauty-everywhere refinement spectators
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.