Quote#Books & Reading
So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures,…
Quote byWilliam Hazlitt · 1778–1830
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Plain Speaker (1826), "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (1822).
English (original)
So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
— William Hazlitt
More from William Hazlitt
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.
Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.