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Conversation
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He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.
-William Hazlitt
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Crime
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
-William Hazlitt
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Customs
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Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
-William Hazlitt
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Cynicism
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
-William Hazlitt
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Death
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Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred --it installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death is the greatest assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the dropsy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust --the finer and more ethereal part mounts with winged spirit to watch over our latest memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.
-William Hazlitt
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Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
-William Hazlitt
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Deception/Lying
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Life is the art of being well deceived.
-William Hazlitt
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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
-William Hazlitt
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Desires
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A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
-William Hazlitt
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Dissent
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It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
-William Hazlitt
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Education
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Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
-William Hazlitt
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Effort
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We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
-William Hazlitt
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Envy / Jealousy
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Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
-William Hazlitt
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Excellence
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One shining quality lends a luster to another, or hides some glaring defect.
-William Hazlitt
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Expectation
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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
-William Hazlitt
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Facts
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General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
-William Hazlitt
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Faith
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If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
-William Hazlitt
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Fame
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
-William Hazlitt
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The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
-William Hazlitt
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Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
-William Hazlitt
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Fashion
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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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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken.
-William Hazlitt, The Conversations of James Northcote
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Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath -- tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
-William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 1839
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Friends
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I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.
-William Hazlitt
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Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
-William Hazlitt
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Books by and about William Hazlitt