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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
Growth
Humour
Funny
Accident
Art
Wit
Else
Compare
Contrasting
Nature
Fancy
Ludicrous
Something
Accidents
Comparing
Product
Exposing
Products
Describing

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
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Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
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Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
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There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
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Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.
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As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
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When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.
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Habit is necessary to give power.
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The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
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Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
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Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
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Love may turn to indifference with possession.
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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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Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
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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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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
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