William Hazlitt Quotes
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The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.
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The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.
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Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.
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Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.
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Love may turn to indifference with possession.
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Love and joy are twins or born of each other.
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Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
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Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.
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The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
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It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.
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Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.
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To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.
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When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
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Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.
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There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
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The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
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Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
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While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.
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The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
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An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself.
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What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
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As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect.
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It is a false principle that because we are entirely occupied with ourselves, we must equally occupy the thoughts of others. The contrary inference is the fair one.
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The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.