William Hazlitt

British essayist and literary critic

Nationality: British

Type: Essayist

Birth: 1778-1830

Page: 1

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

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If merely ''feeling good'' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drun

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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

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The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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Belief creates the actual fact.

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Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.

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The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

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I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice insid

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Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

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The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

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If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained... it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.

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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that in itself is a choice.

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Men's activities are occupied into ways - in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.

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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

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Events are influenced by our very great desires.

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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead.

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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by th

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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.

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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.

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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur til

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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.

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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.