Quote

Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Trying
Empty
Hills
Time
Prove
Stone
Like
Causes
Passed
Looking
Teeth
Dark
Findings
Water
Finding
Pouring
Words
Stones
Hill
Facts
Argument
Rolling

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
William Hazlitt
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The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
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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There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.
William Hazlitt
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A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
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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One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
William Hazlitt
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We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.
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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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
William Hazlitt
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Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
William Hazlitt
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We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
William Hazlitt
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A mighty stream of tendency.
William Hazlitt
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You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
William Hazlitt
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People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
William Hazlitt
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Silence is one great art of conversation.
William Hazlitt
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Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.
William Hazlitt