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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
Anything
Voluntary
Application
Capacity
Depends
Genius
Industry
Talent
Power
Involuntary

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.
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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.
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You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
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No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
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To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.
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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.
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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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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
William Hazlitt
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Despair swallows up cowardice.
William Hazlitt
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If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.
William Hazlitt
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There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass no day without a line-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
William Hazlitt
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Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
William Hazlitt
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Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
William Hazlitt
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The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.
William Hazlitt
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When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
William Hazlitt
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Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
William Hazlitt
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To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
William Hazlitt
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Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.
William Hazlitt