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Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Curiosity
Diverted
Soon
Laborious
Minutes
Emulation
Knowledge
Trifles
Might
Advances
Great
Leisure
Make
Useful
Minute

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A mere literary man is a dull man a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.
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The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.
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A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
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What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
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Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else.
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Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it.
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To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.
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A man is not obliged honestly to answer a question which should not properly be put.
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What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country.
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In the condition of men, it frequently happens that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort as in the works of nature, the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.
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Never speak of a man in his own presence. It is always indelicate, and may be offensive .
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.
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Social sorrow loses half its pain.
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A man who always talks for fame never can be pleasing. The man who talks to unburthen his mind is the man to delight you.
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Condemned to Hope's delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts or slow decline Our social comforts drop away.
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Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.
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The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
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Modern writers are the moons of literature they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
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The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another.
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