Quotes from William Hazlitt

Those who can command themselves command others.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress -- for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.

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

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills

Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman.

Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.

That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.

Thus, to give an obvious instance, if I have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its feet, I am sure that wherever I can find a tree and a brook, I can enjoy the same pleasure again. Hence, when I imagine these objects, I can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology.