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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.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Bottom
Artifice
Wear
Pretension
Quality
Intentions
Use
Disguise
Better
Denied
Make
Qualities
Good
Profession
Praiseworthy
Intention
Professions

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions. A man's look is the work of years, it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.
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True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
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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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The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
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What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.
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Silence is one great art of conversation.
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We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
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That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
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Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
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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 are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.
William Hazlitt
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When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.
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A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
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Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
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