We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
William HazlittDo not quarrel with the world too soon; for, bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in, here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago.
William HazlittComedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
William HazlittThere cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
William HazlittThis is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.
William Hazlitt