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| William Hazlitt
A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn. A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it. Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse. Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune. Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy. Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope, and few are reduced so low as that. I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began. I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about. If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you. It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter. It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse. Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others. No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he. One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect. Prejudice is the child of ignorance. Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater. Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke. The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything. 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 mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up. The most sensible people to be met within 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. The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture. The way to procure insults is to submit to them: a man meets with no more respect than he exacts. There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you. There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice. There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character. They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness. Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress. To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous. To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it. When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest. You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world. |
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