Quote

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

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
Depends
Genius
Industry
Talent
Power
Involuntary
Anything
Voluntary
Application
Capacity

More quotes by William Hazlitt

Image
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt
Image
Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
William Hazlitt
Image
Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
William Hazlitt
Image
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
Image
The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
William Hazlitt
Image
Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
William Hazlitt
Image
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
William Hazlitt
Image
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
William Hazlitt
Image
A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
William Hazlitt
Image
We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.
William Hazlitt
Image
The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
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
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.
William Hazlitt
Image
Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
William Hazlitt
Image
If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
William Hazlitt
Image
It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.
William Hazlitt
Image
Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.
William Hazlitt
Image
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.
William Hazlitt
Image
The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
William Hazlitt