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[Science is] the desire to know causes.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Science
Causes
Desire

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Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
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Power is pleasure and pleasure sweetens pain.
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Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
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To die is only to be as we were before we were born yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
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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.
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He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
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Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.
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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.
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We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
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We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense a substitute for true knowledge.
William Hazlitt
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The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.
William Hazlitt
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The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.
William Hazlitt
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The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
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Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.
William Hazlitt
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Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
William Hazlitt
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Time,--the most independent of all things.
William Hazlitt
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The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
William Hazlitt
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We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.
William Hazlitt
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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
William Hazlitt