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The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Good
Honesty
Thankless
People
Weakness
Ostentation
Failing
Failings
Office
Weaknesses
Virtue
Confession
Less
Modesty
Thought
Sincerity
Seems
Virtues
Savors

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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
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Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly.
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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.
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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.
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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 secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
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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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Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
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A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
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Life is the art of being well deceived and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
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True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
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Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.
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A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
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Love may turn to indifference with possession.
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A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.
William Hazlitt