Repetition: Reason and Imagination by Hazlitt 1778-1830
Channel: Craig Campbell
Date: 20/04/2015

"say that the question were proposed to you — whether, on some occasion, you should thrust your hand into the flames, and were coolly told that you were not at all to consider the pain and anguish it might give you, nor suffer yourself to be led away by any such idle appeals to natural sensibility, but to refer the decision to some abstract, technical ground of propriety, — would you not laugh in your adviser's face? Oh ! no; where our own interests are concerned, or where we are sincere in our professions of regard, the pretended distinction between sound judgment and lively imagination is quickly done away with."

"I cannot forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country" 

"Man is (so to speak) an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told."

Thinkers declare that they are qualified to write a better History of India from having never been there than if he had, as the last might lead to local distinctions or party prejudices; that is to say, that he could describe a country better at secondhand than from original observation, or that from having seen no one object, place, or person, he could do ampler justice to the whole. It might be maintained, much on the same principle, that an artist would paint a better likeness of a person after he was dead, from description or different sketches of the face, than from having seen the individual living man.

William Hazlitt 1778-1830 wrote this essay titled "On Reason And Imagination" and it was published posthumously in 1870. Hazlitt was a voluminous writer as can be seen from the link below.
https://archive.org/details/plainspeakeropin00hazliala

Some of his books include
Liber amoris; or, The new Pygmalion 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyD_XbtDcVo
Hazlitt on English Literature: An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature
The Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits by William Hazlitt
The life of Napoleon Buonaparte