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All theory is against free will all experience is for it.

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
Theory
Wisdom
Freedom
Free
Experience

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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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Large offers and sturdy rejections are among the most common topics of falsehood.
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It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
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Faction seldom leaves a man honest, however it might find him.
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No one will persist long in helping someone who will not help themselves.
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The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
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There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur so many immediate evils are
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No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.
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Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
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Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
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Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible.
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A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
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There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
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The complaint, therefore, that all topicks are preoccupied, is nothing more than the murmur of ignorance or idleness, by which some discourage others, and some themselves the mutability of mankind will always furnish writers with new images, and the luxuriance of fancy may always embellish them with new decorations.
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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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Let him go abroad to a distant country let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.
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I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.
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The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.
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The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.
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Governors being accustomed to hear of more crimes than they can punish, and more wrongs than they can redress, set themselves at ease by indiscriminate negligence, and presently forget the request when they lose sight of the petitioner.
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