Quote

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

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Hate
English
Bugbear
Fear
Merely
Implicitly
Order
England
Insulting
Giving
Necessary
Govern
Believe
Gives
Scope
Imagination
Passions
Passion
Raise
Whatever
Raises

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.
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I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
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Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.
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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.
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We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
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Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
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Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.
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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
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Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
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Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.
William Hazlitt
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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
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You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
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The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
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Life is the art of being well deceived.
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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.
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We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance.
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It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.
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Natural affection is a prejudice for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.
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