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I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

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
Kind
Men
Expected
Less
Found

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Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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Games are good or bad as to their nature all may be perverted.
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Other things may be seized by might, or purchased with money, but knowledge is to be gained only by study, and study to be prosecuted only in retirement.
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Care that is once enter'd into the breast Will have the whole possession ere it rest.
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One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
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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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An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
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The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and stigmatized, before they have the sanction of antiquity conferred upon them, and become precedents of indisputable authority.
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The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.
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Inquiries into the heart are not for man.
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Those who are in the power of evil habits must conquer them as they can and conquered they must be, or neither wisdom nor happiness can be attained: but those who are not yet subject to their influence may, by timely caution, preserve their freedom.
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Lichfield, England. Swallows certainly sleep all winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lye in the bed of a river.
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What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.
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As a madman is apt to think himself grown suddenly great, so he that grows suddenly great is apt to borrow a little from the madman.
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Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.
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The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.
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Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.
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Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.
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Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
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