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When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Internet
Interest
Political
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Ceases
Controversy
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More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.
William Hazlitt
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The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
William Hazlitt
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Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
William Hazlitt
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Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.
William Hazlitt
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
William Hazlitt
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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
William Hazlitt
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There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. I count only the hours that are serene..
William Hazlitt
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The humblest painter is a true scholar and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
William Hazlitt
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To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
William Hazlitt
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We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.
William Hazlitt
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A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.
William Hazlitt
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Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
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
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We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.
William Hazlitt
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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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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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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
William Hazlitt