, remembered for his humanistic essay
s and literary criticism
, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language
, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson
and George Orwell
. Yet his work is currently little read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb
, Stendhal
, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, and William Wordsworth
.
Hazlitt's father
's family were Irish
Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim
to Tipperary
in the early 18th century.
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.
You know more of a road by having travelled it then by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
A scholar is like a book written in a dead language - it is not every one that can read in it.
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.
Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols — it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
Man is a make-believe animal — he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.