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He who endeavors to please must appear pleased.

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
Endeavors
Pleased
Endeavor
Appear
Please
Must

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Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves
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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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Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls.
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Trust as little as you can to report, and examine all you can by your own senses.
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Diffidence may check resolution and obstruct performance, but compensates its embarrassments by more important advantages it conciliates the proud, and softens the severe averts envy from excellence, and censure from miscarriage.
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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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When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.
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Our aspirations are our possibilities.
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The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.
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Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.
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We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor
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They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty.
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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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There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.
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The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
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I have already enjoyed too much give me something to desire.
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He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
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men do not suspect faults which they do not commit
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It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
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Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.
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