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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
Always
Meanness
Thinking
Innate
Origin
Disposition
Proof
Lows
Genteel
Talking
Gentility
Cannot
Surer

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Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.
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General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
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Poverty, when it is voluntary, is never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect.
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Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.
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A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
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Good temper is an estate for life.
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There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
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There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
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There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.
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Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
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We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
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Whatever interests is interesting.
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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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One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
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