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Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Application
Capacity
Depends
Genius
Industry
Talent
Power
Involuntary
Anything
Voluntary

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.
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The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.
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To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.
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To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.
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What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
William Hazlitt
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Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.
William Hazlitt
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We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
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Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
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Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
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The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
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To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
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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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Habit is necessary to give power.
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Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.
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Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
William Hazlitt
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When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.
William Hazlitt
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We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
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Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt none out of ten have the inclination.
William Hazlitt