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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Unless
Greatest
Purpose
Makes
Applied
Character
Purposes
Nothing
Display
Great
Powers
Greatness

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One said a tooth drawer was a kind of unconscionable trade, because his trade was nothing else but to take away those things whereby every man gets his living.
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If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
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A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.
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The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, No. There was a fire in the room.
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Good temper is an estate for life.
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[Science is] the desire to know causes.
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An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence a vain man, in order that it may.
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When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
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Hope is the best possession.
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Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.
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We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
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The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
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Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
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The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.
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The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
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.
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Zeal will do more than knowledge.
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Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
William Hazlitt
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Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
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