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Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

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
Adversary
Treating
Striking
Adversaries
Soft
Battle
Respect

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Let us take a patriot, where we can meet him and, that we may not flatter ourselves by false appearances, distinguish those marks which are certain, from those which may deceive for a man may have the external appearance of a patriot, without the constituent qualities as false coins have often lustre, though they want weight.
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Men have been wise in many different modes but they have always laughed the same way.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
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To scatter praise or blame without regard to justice is to destroy the distinction of good and evil. Many have no other test of actions than general opinion and all are so far influenced by a sense of reputation that they are often restrained by fear of reproach, and excited by hope of honour, when other principles have lost their power.
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We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
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Virtue is too often merely local.
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Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.
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Security will produce danger.
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Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
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Learn that the present hour alone is man's.
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The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.
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It is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. You may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learned them both.
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Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
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Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
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It is unpleasing to represent our affairs to our own disadvantage yet it is necessary to shew the evils which we desire to be removed.
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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.
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Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know That life protracted is protracted woe.
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Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
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Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.
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It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.
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