William Hazlitt

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.

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.