William Hazlitt Quotes

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adults—wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

I don't lie," I lied.

Embrace beautiful lies - the chronic insanity of the sane

... it's always determined characters who make the greatest fools.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream

Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Hypocrisy is annoying but not evil. Someone who says one thing and does another has doubled their chances of being half right.

Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

Those who are overreached by our cunning are far from appearing to us as ridiculous as we appear to ourselves when the cunning of others has overreached us.

How is the anxious soul of man befool'd in his desire, That thinks an hectic fever may be cool'd in flames of fire?

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

The more you act the further you get away from the truth.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.