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There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Truth
Deceive
Littles
Hype
Better
Entertain
Little
Deceiving
Things
Esteem
Think
Piece
Displease
Thinking
Please
Quackery
Pieces
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We are governed by sympathy and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility
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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.
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We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
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Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.
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He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight.
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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.
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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?
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
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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.
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Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
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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.
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A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
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I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
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Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
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One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
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To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
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Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
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General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
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