William Hazlitt

Good temper is an estate for life…

The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favour.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it…

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness, must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.

To be remembered after we are dead, is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel.

Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.

The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity, who drink of that flood of glory as of a river, and refresh our wings in it for future flight.

Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.

An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.

A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one — they shew one another off to the best advantage.

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 true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.