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It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
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Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Way
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Path
Difficulty
Precipices
Though
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Taking
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Come
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Beaten
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That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
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The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.
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Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
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Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.
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One said he wondered that leather was not dearer than any other thing. Being demanded a reason: because, saith he, it is more stood upon than any other thing in the world.
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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
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There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.
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Indolence is a delightful but distressing state we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
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Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
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If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
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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.
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The essence of poetry is will and passion.
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We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
William Hazlitt
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Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
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Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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Books wind into the heart.
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No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
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