Quote

Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.

William Hazlitt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Lasts
Folly
Last
Capable
Spirit
Effects
Obstinacy
Good
Highest
Excites
Cause
Pitch
Wisdom
Heroism
Causes
Producing
Whatever
Contradiction

More quotes by William Hazlitt

Image
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt
Image
It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.
William Hazlitt
Image
To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
William Hazlitt
Image
Zeal will do more than knowledge.
William Hazlitt
Image
It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.
William Hazlitt
Image
Love at first sight is only realizing an imagination that has always haunted us or meeting with a face, a figure, or cast of expression in perfection that we have seen and admired in a less degree or in less favorable circumstances a hundred times before.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
Keep your misfortunes to yourself.
William Hazlitt
Image
Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
William Hazlitt
Image
If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
William Hazlitt
Image
The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.
William Hazlitt
Image
From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
William Hazlitt
Image
Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.
William Hazlitt