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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Poverty
Touchstone
Touchstones
Civility
Test
Tests
Friendship

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.
William Hazlitt
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.
William Hazlitt
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The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
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Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.
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The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
William Hazlitt
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A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.
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We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance.
William Hazlitt
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Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Hazlitt
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
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The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
William Hazlitt
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The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
William Hazlitt
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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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It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.
William Hazlitt
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He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.
William Hazlitt
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The essence of poetry is will and passion.
William Hazlitt
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In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
William Hazlitt
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
William Hazlitt
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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
William Hazlitt