The fear of being silent strikes us dumb.

A writer who has been accustomed to take a connected view of a difficult question and to work it out gradually in all its bearings, may be very deficient in that quickness and ease which men of the world, who are in the habit of hearing a variety of opinions, who pick up an observation on one subject, and another on another, and who care about none any further than the passing away of an idle hour, usually acquire.  An author has studied a particular point—­he has read, he has inquired, he has thought a great deal upon it:  he is not contented to take it up casually in common with others, to throw out a hint, to propose an objection:  he will either remain silent, uneasy, and dissatisfied, or he will begin at the beginning, and go through with it to the end.  He is for taking the whole responsibility upon himself.  He would be thought to understand the subject better than others, or indeed would show that nobody else knows anything about it.  There are always three or four points on which the literary novice at his first outset in life fancies he can enlighten every company, and bear down all opposition:  but he is cured of this quixotic and pugnacious spirit, as he goes more into the world, where he finds that there are other opinions and other pretensions to be adjusted besides his own.  When this asperity wears off, and a certain scholastic precocity is mellowed down, the conversation of men of letters becomes both interesting and instructive.  Men of the world have no fixed principles, no groundwork of thought:  mere scholars have too much an object, a theory always in view, to which they wrest everything, and not unfrequently, common sense itself.  By mixing with society, they rub off their hardness of manner, and impracticable, offensive singularity, while they retain a greater depth and coherence of understanding.  There is more to be learnt from them than from their books.

—­Hazlitt.

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There are some people whose good manners will not suffer them to interrupt you, but, what is almost as bad, will discover abundance of impatience, and lie upon the watch until you have done, because they have started something in their own thoughts, which they long to be delivered of.  Meantime, they are so far from regarding what passes, that their imaginations are wholly turned upon what they have in reserve, for fear it should slip out of their memory; and thus they confine their invention, which might otherwise range over a hundred things full as good, and that might be much more naturally introduced.