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There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Lows
Genteel
Talking
Gentility
Cannot
Surer
Always
Meanness
Thinking
Innate
Origin
Disposition
Proof

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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.
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A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
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To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.
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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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To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
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Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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The worst old age is that of the mind.
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To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
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The more a man writes, the more he can write.
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We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
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Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.
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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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We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.
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In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
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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?
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A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
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