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Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident wit is the product of art and fancy.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Nature
Fancy
Ludicrous
Something
Accidents
Comparing
Product
Exposing
Products
Describing
Growth
Humour
Funny
Accident
Art
Wit
Else
Compare
Contrasting

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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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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Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features.
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I can enjoy society in a room but out of doors, nature is company enough for me
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Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.
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Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.
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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
William Hazlitt
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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
William Hazlitt
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A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
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He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
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The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
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Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.
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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
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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.
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 garb of religion is the best cloak for power.
William Hazlitt
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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
William Hazlitt
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A felon could plead benefit of clergy and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the neck verse, which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.
William Hazlitt
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No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
William Hazlitt