Home > Work > The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays
1 " The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves. "
― William Hazlitt , The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays
2 " The “olden times” are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy. "
3 " The time we lose is not in overdoing what we are about, but in doing nothing. "
4 " The grandeur of [great artists] works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success. "
