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Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
People
Steps
Steep
Natural
Boldness
Become
Seize
Must
Vigor
Great
Lofty
Always
Improving
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Never
Patient
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Ascent

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There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.
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To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.
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The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.
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The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
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The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, No. There was a fire in the room.
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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Do not quarrel with the world too soon for, bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in, here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago.
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Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
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A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
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There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
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One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
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The soul of dispatch is decision.
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The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
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Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
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Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
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Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
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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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To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.
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