Quote

The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

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
States
Forgiving
Professions
Live
Appearance
Appearances
Everything
Profession
Amused
World
Loves
Flattering
Honest
Deceived
State
Hollow
Hallucination
Simple
Plain
Downright
Truth
Forgive
Hallucinations

More quotes by William Hazlitt

Image
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
Image
The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
William Hazlitt
Image
They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
William Hazlitt
Image
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
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
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.
William Hazlitt
Image
The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything to please himself or others.
William Hazlitt
Image
The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.
William Hazlitt
Image
What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
Power is pleasure and pleasure sweetens pain.
William Hazlitt
Image
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
William Hazlitt
Image
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
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
Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
William Hazlitt
Image
If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them if we are constantly with them, we despise them.
William Hazlitt
Image
The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
William Hazlitt
Image
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
Image
First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions. A man's look is the work of years, it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.
William Hazlitt
Image
Reflection makes men cowards.
William Hazlitt