William Hazlitt Quotes

Which, the first meeting with anybody is, you know, everybody is on their best behavior. It's only after you get to know them for a while that you figure out.

What a man is lies as certainly upon his countenance as in his heart, though none of his acquaintances may be able to read it. The very intercourse with him may have rendered it more difficult.

People will always show their true selves in the end.

A good face they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World!

I guess maybe directors see a face that seems to have been lived in. I know that my face has been lived in, yeah.

We can never see who someone really is underneath the skin.

The core of people don't change... what you see is what you get.

Don't judge me by the cover, 'cause I'm a real good book.

On Sir Joshua Reynolds's observing that the real character of a man was found out by his amusements. Yes, Sir, no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.

Look at a person's light, not their lampshade.

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them. —SUZANNE NECKER, WIFE OF JACQUES NECKER, MINISTER OF FINANCE

When the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface

We get a little further from perfection, each year on the road, I guess that's what they call character, I guess that's just the way it goes, better to be dusty than polished, like some store window mannequin, why don't you touch me where i'm rusty, let me stain your hands

He looked less handsome without the smile and glow in his eyes, but he also seemed more real. Being real will get me into trouble faster than any amount of charm.

All men's faces are true, whatsome'er their hands are.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

Do not conceive that fine Clothes make fine Men, any more than fine feathers make fine Birds. A plain genteel dress is more admired and obtains more credit than lace and embroidery in the Eyes of the judicious and sensible.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be.

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.

With my guy, every now and then, he puts on a mask and does that, but he isn't that. Most of the time that we see him, he isn't that. Most of the time that we see him, he's fun to hang around with. I think that's unusual, to that extent.

Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.

It's better to be quotable than honest, I don't speak, I quote. I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.