Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, no… - William Hazlitt

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.