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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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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Whether
Read
Intents
Three
Printed
Book
Purposes
Years
Yesterday
Hundred
Reading
Purpose

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
William Hazlitt
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Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
William Hazlitt
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A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could.
William Hazlitt
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Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.
William Hazlitt
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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
William Hazlitt
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
William Hazlitt
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When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
William Hazlitt
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
William Hazlitt
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
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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An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
William Hazlitt
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Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?
William Hazlitt
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Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.
William Hazlitt
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The public have neither shame or gratitude.
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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People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.
William Hazlitt
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Reflection makes men cowards.
William Hazlitt
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Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
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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It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.
William Hazlitt