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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
Seem
Opinion
Talk
Talking
Seems
Expressing
People
Maintain
Opinions
Sake

More quotes by 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.
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
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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.
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Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
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Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
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The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
William Hazlitt
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
William Hazlitt
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The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
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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Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
William Hazlitt
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A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
William Hazlitt
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Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
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We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
William Hazlitt
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We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
William Hazlitt
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I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
William Hazlitt
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
William Hazlitt