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Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
William Hazlitt -
We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
William Hazlitt
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In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
William Hazlitt -
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
William Hazlitt -
I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt -
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
William Hazlitt -
Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.
William Hazlitt -
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
William Hazlitt
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In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
William Hazlitt -
We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
William Hazlitt -
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
William Hazlitt -
I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
William Hazlitt -
There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
William Hazlitt -
Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
William Hazlitt
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
William Hazlitt -
People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
William Hazlitt -
The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference; it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.
William Hazlitt -
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!
William Hazlitt -
The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
William Hazlitt -
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.
William Hazlitt
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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
William Hazlitt -
A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
William Hazlitt -
The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
William Hazlitt -
Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
William Hazlitt