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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
William Hazlitt -
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
William Hazlitt
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Malice often takes the garb of truth.
William Hazlitt -
Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
William Hazlitt -
Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.
William Hazlitt -
We must be doing something to be happy.
William Hazlitt -
Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
William Hazlitt -
A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
William Hazlitt
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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
William Hazlitt -
We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.
William Hazlitt -
Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
William Hazlitt -
The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
William Hazlitt -
Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
William Hazlitt -
I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.
William Hazlitt
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If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
William Hazlitt -
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
William Hazlitt -
Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
William Hazlitt -
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
William Hazlitt -
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
William Hazlitt -
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.
William Hazlitt
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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
William Hazlitt -
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
William Hazlitt -
The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
William Hazlitt -
The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, "No. There was a fire in the room."
William Hazlitt