"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature
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"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do."

Hemingway, Ernest on literature   

"In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace."

Hecht, Ben on peace
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"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."

Hecht, Ben on trying
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"If you load responsibility on a man unworthy of it he will always betray himself."

Heckscher, August on responsibility
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"We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."

Hegel, Georg on passion
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"Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great."

Hegel, Georg on public opinion
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"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it."

Hazlitt, William on adversity
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"A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means."

Hazlitt, William on desire   

"Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape."

Hazlitt, William on education
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"The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come."

Hazlitt, William on expectation
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"It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world."

Hazlitt, William on faults   

"There are persons who cannot make friends. Who are they? Those who cannot be friends. It is not the want of understanding or good nature, of entertaining or useful qualities, that you complain of: on the contrary, they have probably many points of attraction; but they have one that neutralizes all these --they care nothing about you, and are neither the better nor worse for what you think of them. They manifest no joy at your approach; and when you leave them, it is with a feeling that they can do just as well without you. This is not sullenness, nor indifference, nor absence of mind; but they are intent solely on their own thoughts, and you are merely one of the subjects they exercise them upon. They live in society as in a solitude."

Hazlitt, William on friends and friendship   

"No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history."

Hazlitt, William on greatness   

"We can scarcely hate anyone that we know."

Hazlitt, William on hatred   

"There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation."

Hazlitt, William on ignorance   

"Man is a make-believe animal -- he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

Hazlitt, William on integrity   

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might of been."

Hazlitt, William on laughter
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"Those who can command themselves command others."

Hazlitt, William on leadership
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"First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily."

Hazlitt, William on appearance   

"Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality."

Hazlitt, William on morality   

"Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion."

Hazlitt, William on opinions   

"The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings."

Hazlitt, William on pain
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"No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves."

Hazlitt, William on perfection   

"We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it."

Hazlitt, William on performance   

"The art of pleasing consists in being pleased."

Hazlitt, William on persuasion   

"They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors."

Hazlitt, William on acting and actors   

"The most learned are often the most narrow minded."

Hazlitt, William on prejudice   

"There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice."

Hazlitt, William on 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."

Hazlitt, William on public
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Hazlitt, William on punctuality   

"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."

Hazlitt, William on ridicule   

"A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it."

Hazlitt, William on scholars and scholarship   

"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."

Hazlitt, William on sea   

"We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit."

Hazlitt, William on self-image   

"We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves."

Hazlitt, William on speakers and speaking   

"The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have."

Hazlitt, William on action   

"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."

Hazlitt, William on action
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"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."

Hazlitt, William on books - reading
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"The most sensible people to be met with in 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."

Hazlitt, William on business   

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