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He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Heart
Fray
World
Wisely
Retreat
Retirement
Busy
Lives
Doe
Mingle
Looks
Loopholes

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.
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Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
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We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.
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Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
William Hazlitt
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Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.
William Hazlitt
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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
William Hazlitt
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So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
William Hazlitt
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Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
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Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
William Hazlitt
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The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
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To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
William Hazlitt
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A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
William Hazlitt
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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
William Hazlitt
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The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
William Hazlitt