E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax Quotes
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The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.
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Most men's anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them care for.
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A man that steps aside from the world and has leisure to observe it without interest and design, thinks all mankind as mad as they think him.
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True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
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Nothing would more contribute to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view.
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Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.
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The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.
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Friendship cannot live with ceremony, nor without civility.
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Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.
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In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.
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The Triumph of Wit is to make your good Nature subdue your Censure; to be quick in seeing Faults, and slow in exposing them. You are to consider, that the invisible thing called a Good Name, is made up of the Breath of Numbers that speak well of you; so that if by a disobliging Word you silence the meanest, the Gale will be less strong which is to bear up your Esteem.
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There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured.
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A fool hath no dialogue within himself, the first thought carrieth him without the reply of a second.
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Business is so much lower a thing than learning that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first.
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If none were to have Liberty but those who understand what it is, there would not be many freed Men in the world.
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Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.
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Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought. It must be born with men, or else all the obligations in the world will not create it.
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Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought.
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Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.
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A person may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him a prisoner.
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I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.
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The past is the best way to suppose what may come.
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The more arguments you win, the less friends you will have
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The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.
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A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy.
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Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are seldom upon good Terms.
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If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.
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E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
- Born: April 16, 1881
- Died: December 23, 1959
- Occupation: Former Viceroy of India