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The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Treats
Ignorance
Understand
Everything
Insolence
Vulgar
Contempt
Proportion
Treat

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Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
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The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
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As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
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The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
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Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
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As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
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The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.
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Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
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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.
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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.
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A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
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The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything to please himself or others.
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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.
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Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
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The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.
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There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
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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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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
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I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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