Quote

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Action
Frame
Thought
Delightful
States
Tendencies
Human
Necessary
Humans
State
Must
Happiness
Distressing
Something
Happy
Indolence
Less
Instinctive

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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We must be doing something to be happy.
William Hazlitt
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
William Hazlitt
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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.
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
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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 who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.
William Hazlitt
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Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence.
William Hazlitt
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No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
William Hazlitt
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Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.
William Hazlitt
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We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
William Hazlitt
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Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
William Hazlitt
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Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
William Hazlitt
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When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
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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It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.
William Hazlitt
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Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.
William Hazlitt
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It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.
William Hazlitt
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Who likes not his business, his business likes not him.
William Hazlitt
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It is well there is no one without fault for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to s different species.
William Hazlitt
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Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.
William Hazlitt