Quote

Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Standards
Propriety
Anyone
Expects
Character
Mainly
Everything
Conform
Must
Surprised
Standard
Thoughtless
Sees
Conceited
Ignorant
Wonderfully

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To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
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A mighty stream of tendency.
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Prosperity is a great teacher adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind privation trains and strengthens it.
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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.
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The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
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The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
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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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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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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
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Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
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We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
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People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
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He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
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A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
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Habit is necessary to give power.
William Hazlitt
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He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to an end of his wealth.
William Hazlitt
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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
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It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.
William Hazlitt
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He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
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