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There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Idiot
Advantage
Wise
Cannot
Descend
Much
Despicable
Men
Advantages
Thoroughly
Lower

More quotes by 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.
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We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
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So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
William Hazlitt
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The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
William Hazlitt
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense a substitute for true knowledge.
William Hazlitt
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Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
William Hazlitt
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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.
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Power is pleasure and pleasure sweetens pain.
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There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
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The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
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The soul of dispatch is decision.
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Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
William Hazlitt
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Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
William Hazlitt
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Popularity disarms envy in well-disposed minds. Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others who feel that the world has done them justice. When success has not this effect in opening the mind, it is a sign that it has been ill deserved.
William Hazlitt
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Books are a world in themselves, it is true but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.
William Hazlitt
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Principle is a passion for truth.
William Hazlitt
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Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
William Hazlitt
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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