Quotes from William Hazlitt

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles.

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.

We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

Sacrifices are no sacrifices when they are repaid a thousand fold.

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

We are very much what others think of us . The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

The time we lose is not in overdoing what we are about, but in doing nothing.

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told.