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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
People
Mets
Cobweb
Instead
Cobwebs
Ought
Distinctions
Society
Spinning
Business
Argue
Things
Sensible
Men
Distinction
World
Arguing

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The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
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Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.
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Those who can command themselves command others.
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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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All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
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The only true retirement is that of the heart the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.
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A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.
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Death cancels everything but truth and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.
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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.
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Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.
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Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.
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Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
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Zeal will do more than knowledge.
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I am proud up to the point of equality everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
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The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
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The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
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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.
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Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident wit is the product of art and fancy.
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
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