Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.
William HazlittRead
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
Interpretation
Familiarity can blur our ability to judge things clearly due to preconceptions and biases.
William Hazlitt's quote highlights how becoming too familiar with someone or something can obscure our perceptions, making it difficult to see their true traits. When we are influenced by prior knowledge or biases, our judgments can become clouded and less objective, leading to a misunderstanding of the subject at hand.
In practice
This quote could be used during a discussion on relationships to emphasize how familiarity can affect perceptions.
Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself And falls on the other side
...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.
We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.
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