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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Use
Like
Rusts
Rust
Intelligence
Genius
Humanity

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
William Hazlitt
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I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.
William Hazlitt
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To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
William Hazlitt
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We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.
William Hazlitt
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I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
William Hazlitt
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Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
William Hazlitt
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A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
William Hazlitt
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
William Hazlitt
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We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
William Hazlitt
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To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
William Hazlitt
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Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.
William Hazlitt
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When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
William Hazlitt
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Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.
William Hazlitt
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The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.
William Hazlitt
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Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.
William Hazlitt
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It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.
William Hazlitt
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There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which, we often yield as to a resistless power nor can he reasonably expect, the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.
William Hazlitt
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Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.
William Hazlitt
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
William Hazlitt
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No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
William Hazlitt