Quote

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Ought
Distinctions
Society
Spinning
Business
Argue
Things
Sensible
Men
Distinction
World
Arguing
People
Mets
Cobweb
Instead
Cobwebs

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We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.
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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
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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.
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
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The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.
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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.
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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
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We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.
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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.
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In what we really understand, we reason but little.
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If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them if we are constantly with them, we despise them.
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Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.
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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
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We go on a journey to be free of all impediments to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others
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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
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