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People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Vice
Vices
Resources
Leave
Nature
Cannot
Resource
People
Persist
Weary

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
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To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.
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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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I am proud up to the point of equality everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
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Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
William Hazlitt
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
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We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
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Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.
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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
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Do not quarrel with the world too soon for, bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in, here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago.
William Hazlitt
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The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.
William Hazlitt
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The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
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We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.
William Hazlitt
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The public have neither shame or gratitude.
William Hazlitt
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Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
William Hazlitt
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Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.
William Hazlitt
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Dandyism is a variety of genius.
William Hazlitt
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Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
William Hazlitt