Date: 1818

"But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were 'the secret soul of harmony.'"

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1818

"It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1818

"This language is not the less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1819

"He who saves me from this conclusion, who makes a mock of this doctrine, and sets at nought its power, is to me not less than the God of my idolatry, for he has left one drop of comfort in my soul."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1819

"The plague-spot has not tainted me quite; I am not leprous all over, the lie of Legitimacy does not fix its mortal sting in my inmost soul, nor, like an ugly spider, entangle me in its slimy folds; but is kept off from me, and broods on its own poison."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1819

"If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor he could not become, a tyrant by right divine."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1819

"But there are persons of that low and inordinate appetite for servility, that they cannot be satisfied with any thing short of that sort of tyranny that has lasted for ever, and is likely to last for ever; that is strengthened and made desperate by the superstitions and prejudices of ages; that ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1819

"He is styed in his prejudices -- he wallows in the mire of his senses -- he cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of gold or wood."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: February, 1821

"Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: February, 1821

"The reliance on solid worth which it inculcates, the preference of sober truth to gaudy tinsel, hangs like a mill-stone round the neck of the imagination—-'a load to sink a navy'--impedes our progress, and blocks up every prospect in life."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)