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We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Anything
Gives
Thrown
Ridicule
Giving
Sure
Acknowledge
Casting
Help
Envy
Hence
Rather
Bear
Superior
Helping
Bears
Scale
Another
Weight
Superiors
Cannot
Equal
Scales
Prevail
Truth
Mankind
Merit
Malice

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
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The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.
William Hazlitt
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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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What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
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Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.
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Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman dignity is proper to noblemen and majesty to kings.
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The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.
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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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Books wind into the heart.
William Hazlitt
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Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
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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 art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
William Hazlitt
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Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.
William Hazlitt
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Good temper is an estate for life.
William Hazlitt
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Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
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One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey but I like to go by myself.
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Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
William Hazlitt