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Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Mets
Among
Education
Quality
Common
People
Rarest
Uneducated
Wit

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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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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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.
William Hazlitt
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The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
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Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
William Hazlitt
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Death puts an end to rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.
William Hazlitt
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A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
William Hazlitt
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There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
William Hazlitt
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Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
William Hazlitt
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Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.
William Hazlitt
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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?
William Hazlitt
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The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.
William Hazlitt
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The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.
William Hazlitt
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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
William Hazlitt
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The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.
William Hazlitt
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The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
William Hazlitt
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Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.
William Hazlitt
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Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt