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Quotes from Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays — William Hazlitt

1778–1830 England

← All quotes by William Hazlitt

15 quotes

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

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

Prejudice is the child of ignorance…

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

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.

Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William Hazlitt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.