William Hazlitt Quotes
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You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
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I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
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Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
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We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
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Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.
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Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
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When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.
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Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
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We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
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The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
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Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
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I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
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If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
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Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
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The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.
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To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.
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People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
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The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
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Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.
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The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.