William Hazlitt

"Good temper is an estate for life…"

"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."

"Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it."

"The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public."

"We are not hypocrites in our sleep."

"We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again."

"A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them."

"Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them."

"To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead."

"If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it."

"Horus non numero nisi serenas—"I count only the hours that are serene"—is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled."

"Gallantry to women (the sure road to their favor) is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it."

"But there is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body."

"Indeed some degree of affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all."

"We all wear some disguise — make some professions — use some artifice to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom, though we may endeavour to keep some others that we think less to our credit as much as possible in the background…"

"The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be as constantly wound up."

"Again, there is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have also their altars and their religion."

"Prejudice is the child of ignorance…"

"We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it."

"Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse."

"Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life."

"A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man."

"But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath — tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute."

"Worte sind die einzigen Dinge, die nie vergehen."

"Wir werden nie etwas gut machen, bis wir aufhören, nachzudenken, wie wir es machen werden."

"Im Schlaf sind wir keine Heuchler."

"Es ist besser, weder lesen noch schreiben zu können, als weiter nichts zu können."

"Die Kunst zu erfreuen besteht darin, selbst erfreut zu sein."

"Die Freiheit lieben, heißt andere lieben; die Macht lieben, sich selbst zu lieben."