William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.
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Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.
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Love may turn to indifference with possession.
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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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Love and joy are twins or born of each other.
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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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To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.
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Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.
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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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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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When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
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That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
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The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
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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 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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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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While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.
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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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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.