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With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.
William Hazlitt -
We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.
William Hazlitt
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The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
William Hazlitt -
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
William Hazlitt -
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
William Hazlitt -
Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.
William Hazlitt -
Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
William Hazlitt -
Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
William Hazlitt
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I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
William Hazlitt -
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
William Hazlitt -
[Science is] the desire to know causes.
William Hazlitt -
As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
William Hazlitt -
There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.
William Hazlitt -
We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.
William Hazlitt
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Time,--the most independent of all things.
William Hazlitt -
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
William Hazlitt -
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
William Hazlitt -
Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.
William Hazlitt -
A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
William Hazlitt -
We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
William Hazlitt
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Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
William Hazlitt -
The soul of dispatch is decision.
William Hazlitt -
It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.
William Hazlitt -
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
William Hazlitt