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He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an 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
Uncertainty
Certainty
Wise
Wisdom
Men
Quit
Quitting

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The end of writing is to instruct the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.
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Knock the 't' off the 'can't.'
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A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.
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No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
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That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.
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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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The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.
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Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.
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Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.
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Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it.
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In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.
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You think I love flattery (says Dr. Johnson), and so I do but a little too much always disgusts me: that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.
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The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man.
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A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
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No wonder, Sir, that he is vain a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.
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In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.
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Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.
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So scanty is our present allowance of happiness that in many situations life could scarcely be supported if hope were not allowed to relieve the present hour by pleasures borrowed from the future.
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A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.
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