Quote

The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Merit
Actual
Genius
Easier
Talent
Effectual
Less
Attainment
Embarrassing
Assumption

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.
William Hazlitt
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Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.
William Hazlitt
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Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
William Hazlitt
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Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
William Hazlitt
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Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
William Hazlitt
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The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
William Hazlitt
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The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
William Hazlitt
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One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
William Hazlitt
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Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for one's dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead Downs.
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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Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.
William Hazlitt
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The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
William Hazlitt
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Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
William Hazlitt
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Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.
William Hazlitt
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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
William Hazlitt
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The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
William Hazlitt
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The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.
William Hazlitt
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No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
William Hazlitt