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
Mankind
Destroys
Laughing
Ridicule
Worth
Weaknesses
Comedy
Folly
Food
Naturally
Follies
Lives
Leaves
Exposing
Ends
Constantly
Successfully
Nothing
Weakness
Wears

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To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
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The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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The most learned are often the most narrow minded.
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Those who can command themselves command others.
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The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
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There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.
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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
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In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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To die is only to be as we were before we were born yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
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People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
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Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
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Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.
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The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
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To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.
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