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We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Heart
Understandings
Hearts
Eyes
Understanding
Eye
Fall
Nature

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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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.
William Hazlitt
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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
William Hazlitt
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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
William Hazlitt
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To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
William Hazlitt
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Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
William Hazlitt
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Habit is necessary to give power.
William Hazlitt
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
William Hazlitt
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What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
William Hazlitt
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Violence ever defeats its own ends. Where you cannot drive you can always persuade. A gentle word, a kind look, a god-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles. There is a secret pride in every human heart than revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
William Hazlitt
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Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
William Hazlitt
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt
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We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
William Hazlitt
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The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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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
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There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.
William Hazlitt
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We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.
William Hazlitt
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Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.
William Hazlitt
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There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.
William Hazlitt
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The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
William Hazlitt