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The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Struck
Disposition
Spirits
Hardest
Anger
Fire
Phlegmatic
Often
Dispositions
Spirit
Contain

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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
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The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.
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The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.
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Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
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There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.
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We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.
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Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
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Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
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The essence of poetry is will and passion.
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We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
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Dandyism is a variety of genius.
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Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
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A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
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When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.
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Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.
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It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
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Dandyism is a species of genius.
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The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
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The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
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