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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Fine
Else
Nothing
Good
World
Speculation
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Subjects

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
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[Science is] the desire to know causes.
William Hazlitt
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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.
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The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
William Hazlitt
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We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
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The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, No. There was a fire in the room.
William Hazlitt
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If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
William Hazlitt
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The soul of dispatch is decision.
William Hazlitt
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Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
William Hazlitt
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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
William Hazlitt
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To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
William Hazlitt
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To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.
William Hazlitt
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As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
William Hazlitt
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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
William Hazlitt
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While we desire, we do not enjoy and with enjoyment desire ceases.
William Hazlitt
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A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them
William Hazlitt
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People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.
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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We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
William Hazlitt
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The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
William Hazlitt