Quote

Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Language
Veil
Ideas
Adds
Giving
Veils
Like
Add
Atmosphere
Naked
Softness
Objects
Refinement
Gives
Throws

More quotes by 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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The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
William Hazlitt
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When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
William Hazlitt
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I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it. He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends, or to accomplish a useful object.
William Hazlitt
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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
William Hazlitt
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
William Hazlitt
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A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
William Hazlitt
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Despair swallows up cowardice.
William Hazlitt
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
William Hazlitt
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What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.
William Hazlitt
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Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.
William Hazlitt
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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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A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.
William Hazlitt
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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
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The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
William Hazlitt
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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
William Hazlitt
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Elegance is something more than ease it is more than a freedom from awkwardness or restraint. It implies, I conceive, a precision, a polish, a sparkling, spirited yet delicate.
William Hazlitt
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The soul of dispatch is decision.
William Hazlitt
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A felon could plead benefit of clergy and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the neck verse, which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.
William Hazlitt
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The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.
William Hazlitt