Quote

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Never
Cease
Think
Language
Thinking
Difficult
Speak
Natives
Anything
Correctly
Reason
Spontaneity
Wells
Manner
Well
Till

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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
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Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
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To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
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There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.
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The only true retirement is that of the heart the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.
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The public have neither shame or gratitude.
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There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
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Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.
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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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We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.
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Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
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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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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
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What is popular is not necessarily vulgar and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
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Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it
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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
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Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.
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The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
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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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