William Hazlitt Quotes
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A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.
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Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
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His hypothesis goes to this - to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.
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Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.
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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
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The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
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Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
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He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
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The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
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Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
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There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
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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.
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Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.
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The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.
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The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
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I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
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No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
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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.
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We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me
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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.