Quote

When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Ends
Competition
Outdo
Doe
Oneself
Exertions
Walk
Exertion
Better
Progress
Ceases
Make
Walks
Improvement
Point
Nearly
Everyone
Cease
Else
Painful

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
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No young man ever thinks he shall die.
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We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
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The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.
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The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
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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.
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A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
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Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
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Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
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Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
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The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.
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Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.
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There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.
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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
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We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
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Keep your misfortunes to yourself.
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Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
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Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.
William Hazlitt