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Happiness, said he, must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty.

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
Something
Solid
Uncertainty
Permanent
Happiness
Fear
Without
Must

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Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible
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I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
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As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.
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The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.
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It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.
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Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour.
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When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life for there is in London all that life can afford.
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The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
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Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.
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Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
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It is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation.
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Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
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They who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it.
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I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
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The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love, like being enlivened with champagne.
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The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.
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Truth allows no choice.
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A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him.
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Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.
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A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.
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