Quote

A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Often
Ill
Spirit
Spite
Nature
Enemies
Thoughtless
Certain
Strikes
Caution
Make
Safety
Deliberate
Good
Humor
Guard
Enemy
Spirits
Animal
Excess

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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
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Features alone do not run in the blood vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
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Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.
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Hope is the best possession.
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The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.
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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.
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To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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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.
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I am then never less alone than when alone
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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
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You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
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Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
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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.
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We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
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The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.
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Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
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