Top 100 Hazlitt Quotes
#1. In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.
Anthony Hopkins
#2. Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)
Alan Bennett
#3. I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.
Helene Hanff
#4. Out from under it. "We never do anything well 'til we cease to think about the manner of doing it." - William Hazlitt
Zig Ziglar
#5. Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. - William Hazlitt
M.C. Beaton
#6. There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
William Hazlitt
#7. We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.
William Hazlitt
#8. The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
William Hazlitt
#9. There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
William Hazlitt
#10. A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.
William Hazlitt
#11. If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt
#12. It is a false principle that because we are entirely occupied with ourselves, we must equally occupy the thoughts of others. The contrary inference is the fair one.
William Hazlitt
#13. Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
William Hazlitt
#14. Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
William Hazlitt
#16. To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.
Henry Hazlitt
#17. It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
William Hazlitt
#18. There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.
William Hazlitt
#19. New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.
Henry Hazlitt
#20. Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
William Hazlitt
#21. The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.
William Hazlitt
#22. 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.
William Hazlitt
#24. The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one. The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice.
Henry Hazlitt
#25. Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
William Hazlitt
#26. Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.
William Hazlitt
#27. If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have been trying to run it. We must run the economy for everybody
Henry Hazlitt
#28. Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.
William Hazlitt
#31. The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error.
Henry Hazlitt
#32. Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
William Hazlitt
#33. Another way to find whether an analogy is fallacious is to see whether you can discover a counter analogy. Surely this is the most effective practice in refuting analogy in argument.
Henry Hazlitt
#34. The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!
Henry Hazlitt
#35. The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.
William Hazlitt
#36. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.
William Hazlitt
#37. The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
William Hazlitt
#38. The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.
William Hazlitt
#39. We go on a journey to be free of all impediments; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others
William Hazlitt
#41. Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
William Hazlitt
#42. I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
William Hazlitt
#43. The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
William Hazlitt
#44. We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little
of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion]
William Hazlitt
#45. We dread life's termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.
William Hazlitt
#46. It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.
William Hazlitt
#47. Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
William Hazlitt
#49. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Henry Hazlitt
#50. Love turns, with little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.
William Hazlitt
#51. 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.
William Hazlitt
#52. When we forget old friends, it is a sign we have forgotten ourselves.
William Hazlitt
#53. A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
William Hazlitt
#54. The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
William Hazlitt
#55. In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
William Hazlitt
#56. Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.
William Hazlitt
#57. I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
#58. There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
William Hazlitt
#59. Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.
William Hazlitt
#60. Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]
William Hazlitt
#61. Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
William Hazlitt
#62. The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.
William Hazlitt
#63. The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken, as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos.
Henry Hazlitt
#64. It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.
William Hazlitt
#65. Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
William Hazlitt
#66. One occupation can expand only at the expense of all other occupations.
Henry Hazlitt
#67. Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.
William Hazlitt
#68. Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
William Hazlitt
#69. Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
William Hazlitt
#70. The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more - to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.
Henry Hazlitt
#71. The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.
William Hazlitt
#72. Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner
and then to thinking!
William Hazlitt
#73. All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
William Hazlitt
#74. We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
William Hazlitt
#75. Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
William Hazlitt
#76. Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
Henry Hazlitt
#78. The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
William Hazlitt
#79. A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions, lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-money issues, which lead to higher prices.
Henry Hazlitt
#80. The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.
William Hazlitt
#81. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
William Hazlitt
#82. Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
William Hazlitt
#83. One of the worst features of all the plans for sharing wealth and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight of the conditions and institution s that are necessary to create wealth and income in the first place.
Henry Hazlitt
#84. Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
William Hazlitt
#85. A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
William Hazlitt
#86. The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
William Hazlitt
#87. 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.
William Hazlitt
#88. Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman.
William Hazlitt
#89. From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation.
Henry Hazlitt
#90. Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
William Hazlitt
#91. True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
William Hazlitt
#92. Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.
William Hazlitt
#93. While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.
William Hazlitt
#94. Each of us must also sell something, even if for most of us it is our own services rather than goods, in order to get the purchasing power to buy.
Henry Hazlitt
#95. The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
William Hazlitt
#96. We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
William Hazlitt
#98. Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
William Hazlitt
#99. Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
William Hazlitt
#100. Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
William Hazlitt
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