William Hazlitt People Quotations

The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.

Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

There are two classes of people that I have observed who are not so distinct as might be imagined -- those who cannot keep their own money in their hands, and those who cannot keep their hands from other people's.

An indigestion is an excellent common-place for two people that never met before.

It is surely a distinct question, what you can persuade people to do by argument and fair discussion, and what you may lawfully compel them to do, when reason and remonstrance fail.

If we use no ceremony toward others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.

When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.

It has been the resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age, ever threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements - not (as is pretended) the chimerical anticipation of possible advantages, but the intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and growing abuses.

People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.

The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.

Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.

Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people.

I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

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.

You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.

People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.

If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.

People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.

We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.

The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.

Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.