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People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
People
Maintain
Opinions
Sake
Seem
Opinion
Talk
Talking
Seems
Expressing

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
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What is popular is not necessarily vulgar and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
William Hazlitt
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To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
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Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
William Hazlitt
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There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.
William Hazlitt
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
William Hazlitt
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Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.
William Hazlitt
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The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.
William Hazlitt
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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
William Hazlitt
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The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.
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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Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
William Hazlitt
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There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
William Hazlitt
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Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
William Hazlitt
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The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
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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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
William Hazlitt
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He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.
William Hazlitt