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What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Often
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Dexterity
Others
Talent
Passes
May
Principles
Enterprise
World
Share
Invention
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Nice
Fail
Greater
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Moral
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Expedients

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Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
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To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
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[Science is] the desire to know causes.
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In what we really understand, we reason but little.
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What is popular is not necessarily vulgar and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
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One said a tooth drawer was a kind of unconscionable trade, because his trade was nothing else but to take away those things whereby every man gets his living.
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Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.
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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.
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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
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The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.
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There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
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While we desire, we do not enjoy and with enjoyment desire ceases.
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The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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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.
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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
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Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
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Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.
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