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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.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Common
Genuine
Thorough
Words
English
Discourse
Force
Conversation
Aside
Speak
Choice
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Write
Truly
Ease
Writing
Style
Command
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Pedantic
Anyone
Familiar
Flourishes

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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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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A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
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Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
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Books wind into the heart.
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Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
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I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
William Hazlitt
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Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise of all arguments the most unanswerable.
William Hazlitt
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Books are a world in themselves, it is true but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.
William Hazlitt
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
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In what we really understand, we reason but little.
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Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
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We must be doing something to be happy.
William Hazlitt
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Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
William Hazlitt
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Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.
William Hazlitt
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The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
William Hazlitt
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The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.
William Hazlitt
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We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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Silence is one great art of conversation.
William Hazlitt
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Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
William Hazlitt
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The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
William Hazlitt