Quote

Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Comedy
Folly
Food
Naturally
Follies
Lives
Leaves
Exposing
Ends
Constantly
Successfully
Nothing
Weakness
Wears
Mankind
Destroys
Laughing
Ridicule
Worth
Weaknesses

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
William Hazlitt
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A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
William Hazlitt
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A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
William Hazlitt
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt
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Despair swallows up cowardice.
William Hazlitt
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Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.
William Hazlitt
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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
William Hazlitt
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Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
William Hazlitt
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Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
William Hazlitt
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The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.
William Hazlitt
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A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
William Hazlitt
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Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
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.
William Hazlitt
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A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
William Hazlitt
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The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
William Hazlitt
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As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
William Hazlitt
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The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
William Hazlitt
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
William Hazlitt
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But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
William Hazlitt
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Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.
William Hazlitt