Quote

The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.

William Hazlitt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Neither
Wise
Less
Better
Way
World
Neighbours
Neighbour
Worse

More quotes by William Hazlitt

Image
Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
William Hazlitt
Image
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
Image
The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.
William Hazlitt
Image
Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
William Hazlitt
Image
Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.
William Hazlitt
Image
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
William Hazlitt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
William Hazlitt
Image
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
William Hazlitt
Image
Books wind into the heart.
William Hazlitt
Image
Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
William Hazlitt
Image
Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
William Hazlitt
Image
There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass no day without a line-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
William Hazlitt
Image
The most learned are often the most narrow minded.
William Hazlitt
Image
The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
William Hazlitt
Image
We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.
William Hazlitt
Image
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
William Hazlitt