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
character personality merit
Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
art knowledge people
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
book knowledge world
It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.
art moving men
There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.
men proud doe
A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it.
art attention hearing
The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
art deceived-us deception
Life is the art of being well deceived.
hate believe passion
It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.
hate writing space
I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
art
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
fall imagination people
When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
believe men imagination
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
thinking wish virtue
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
thinking advice sage
We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.