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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
Men
Greatness
Ascent
People
Steps
Steep
Natural
Boldness
Become
Seize
Must
Vigor
Great
Lofty
Always
Improving
Eminence
Never
Patient
Wary

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An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
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Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
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Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
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Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
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Painting gives the object itself poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
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Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
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Features alone do not run in the blood vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
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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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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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No young man ever thinks he shall die.
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A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
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The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
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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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He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
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Well I've had a happy life.
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Without life there can be no action — no objects of pursuit — no restless desires — no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to it — that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.
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