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We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Facts
Case
Truth
Cases
Wells
Written
Well
Reading
Vividness
Knowledge
Representations
Common
Representation
Faith
Romance
History
Mere

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
William Hazlitt
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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
William Hazlitt
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Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
William Hazlitt
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All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
William Hazlitt
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I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
William Hazlitt
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The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
William Hazlitt
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Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.
William Hazlitt
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True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
William Hazlitt
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The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.
William Hazlitt
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A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.
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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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
William Hazlitt
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Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
William Hazlitt
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The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
William Hazlitt
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Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.
William Hazlitt
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We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
William Hazlitt
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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
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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Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
William Hazlitt