Hazlitt Quotes

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Dickens saw Victorian England always with the eyres of a pre-Victorian. His ideal England was the England of Hazlitt and of Pickwick. View quote
C. L. R. James
I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me. View quote
Helene Hanff
In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it. View quote
Anthony Hopkins
Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson are the greatest English critics of their respective centuries not least because they are the funniest. View quote
William Empson
... as last night I lay in bed, There came before my eyes that wonted thread Of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances, That every other minute vex and please: Things all disjointed come from north and south, - Two witch's eyes above a cherub's mouth, Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon, And Alexander with his nightcap on; Old Socrates a-tying his cravat, And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth's cat; And Junius Brutus, pretty well so-so, Making the best of's way towards Soho. Few are there who escape these visitings- Perhaps one or two whose lives have patent wings, And through whose curtains peeps no hellish nose, No wild-boar tushes, and no mermaid's toes; But flowers bursting out with lusty pride, And young Æolian harps personified; Some Titian colours touch'd into real life, - The sacrifice goes on;.. View quote
John Keats