Quote

Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Funny
Consciously
Making
Absurdity
Others
Pointing
Nature
Humour
Wit
Ill
Ridiculing
Talk
Absurdly
Less
Unconsciously

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.
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Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.
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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
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While we desire, we do not enjoy and with enjoyment desire ceases.
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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
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By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
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The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.
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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
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The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
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Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else.
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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.
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Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.
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He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
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Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.
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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.
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True friendship is self-love at second hand where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.
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There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
William Hazlitt
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The humblest painter is a true scholar and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
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Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
William Hazlitt