Quote

When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Imagination
Continually
Fall
Dread
People
Vice
Falling
Vices
Terror
Brink
Mere
Precipice
System
Fling

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Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
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The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.
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We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
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You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
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He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
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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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Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
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Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
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The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
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To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.
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I am then never less alone than when alone
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Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
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The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
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No young man ever thinks he shall die.
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The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.
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We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.
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Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.
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We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
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The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
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Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.
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