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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.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Might
Points
Made
Air
Acuteness
Taking
Illustrated
Saying
Subtlety
Feeling
Atoms
Understanding
Solid
Feelings
Consists
Truth
Distinction

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
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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.
William Hazlitt
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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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The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.
William Hazlitt
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An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence a vain man, in order that it may.
William Hazlitt
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
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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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.
William Hazlitt
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Death cancels everything but truth and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.
William Hazlitt
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Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.
William Hazlitt
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Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
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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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
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No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
William Hazlitt
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The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
William Hazlitt
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The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.
William Hazlitt
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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
William Hazlitt
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A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them
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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Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
William Hazlitt