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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
Natural
Boldness
Become
Seize
Must
Vigor
Great
Lofty
Always
Improving
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Never
Patient
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Men
Greatness
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Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
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Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.
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Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt none out of ten have the inclination.
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Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.
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He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
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Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
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Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
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Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
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There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.
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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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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.
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Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
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The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
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What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
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When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
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Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
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No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.
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Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
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Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
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A mighty stream of tendency.
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