Quote

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Self
Mistress
Love
Excellence
Merely
Circumstances
Choose
Friend
Particular
Flatters
Often
Circumstance

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
William Hazlitt
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When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.
William Hazlitt
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Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
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
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To die is only to be as we were before we were born yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
William Hazlitt
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The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness.
William Hazlitt
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Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.
William Hazlitt
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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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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Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people.
William Hazlitt
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I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.
William Hazlitt
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To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
William Hazlitt
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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
William Hazlitt
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Well I've had a happy life.
William Hazlitt
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
William Hazlitt
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There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
William Hazlitt
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Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
William Hazlitt
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The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
William Hazlitt
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Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
William Hazlitt
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The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.
William Hazlitt