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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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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
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Chess
Construct
Power
Leaves
Constructs
Without
Greatness
Confined
Terminating
Great
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Men
Skills
Display
Displays
World
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Skill
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Trials
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Individual
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Momentary

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Indolence is a delightful but distressing state we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
William Hazlitt
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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
William Hazlitt
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Zeal will do more than knowledge.
William Hazlitt
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The humblest painter is a true scholar and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
William Hazlitt
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There is evil poured upon the earth from the overflowings of corruption-- Sickness, and poverty, and pain, and guilt, and madness, and sorrow But, as the water from a fountain riseth and sinketh to its level, Ceaselessly toileth justice to equalize the lots of men.
William Hazlitt
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
William Hazlitt
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The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
William Hazlitt
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt
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Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly.
William Hazlitt
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The only true retirement is that of the heart the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.
William Hazlitt
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Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
William Hazlitt
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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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Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
William Hazlitt
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Habit is necessary to give power.
William Hazlitt
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From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.
William Hazlitt
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Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
William Hazlitt
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In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
William Hazlitt
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There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. I count only the hours that are serene..
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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Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
William Hazlitt