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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.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Wells
Weakness
Foiled
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Resources
Calculate
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Courage
Meanness
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Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman dignity is proper to noblemen and majesty to kings.
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To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.
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There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
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The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.
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An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence a vain man, in order that it may.
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You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
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The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
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Books wind into the heart.
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Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
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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.
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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?
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
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To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
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