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

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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.
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There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass no day without a line-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
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The love of liberty is the love of others the love of power is the love of ourselves.
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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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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.
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We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
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To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.
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People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
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A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
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Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
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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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The worst old age is that of the mind.
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A wise traveler never despises his own country.
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The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
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We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
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The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
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There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
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