Quote

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Serpent
Chain
Chains
Habit
Around
Heart
Coils
Like
Gnaw
Stifle

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Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.
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By retaliating our sufferings on the heads of those we love, we get rid of a present uneasiness and incur lasting remorse. With the accomplishment of our revenge our fondness returns so that we feel the injury we have done them, even more than they do.
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
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The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.
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People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.
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There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
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Whatever interests is interesting.
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Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
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The humblest painter is a true scholar and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
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The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.
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Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.
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The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
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A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth.
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A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
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There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.
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Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.
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We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object.
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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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Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
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A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
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