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If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
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Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Reading
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Shakespeare
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More quotes by 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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The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
William Hazlitt
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There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
William Hazlitt
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There is evil poured upon the earth from the overflowings of corruption-- Sickness, and poverty, and pain, and guilt, and madness, and sorrow But, as the water from a fountain riseth and sinketh to its level, Ceaselessly toileth justice to equalize the lots of men.
William Hazlitt
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Words are the only things that last for ever.
William Hazlitt
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When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
William Hazlitt
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One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
William Hazlitt
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If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them if we are constantly with them, we despise them.
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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We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance.
William Hazlitt
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Power is pleasure and pleasure sweetens pain.
William Hazlitt
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Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
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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Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
William Hazlitt
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A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.
William Hazlitt
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Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
William Hazlitt
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You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
William Hazlitt
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We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
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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Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
William Hazlitt