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To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Think
Humankind
Thinking
Ill
Highest
Mankind
Perhaps
Virtue
Wisdom
Wish

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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
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He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
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Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
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Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.
William Hazlitt
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Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.
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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.
William Hazlitt
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There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
William Hazlitt
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Despair swallows up cowardice.
William Hazlitt
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To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.
William Hazlitt
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The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.
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We go on a journey to be free of all impediments to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others
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A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.
William Hazlitt
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Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.
William Hazlitt
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To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
William Hazlitt
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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
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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
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None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
William Hazlitt
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The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
William Hazlitt
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
William Hazlitt
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To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.
William Hazlitt