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Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Curiosity
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First
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Mind
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Generous
Last
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding.
Samuel Johnson
..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.
Samuel Johnson
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.
Samuel Johnson
Rags will always make their appearance where they have a right to do it.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Samuel Johnson
In all pleasures hope is a considerable part.
Samuel Johnson
New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.
Samuel Johnson
Poetry cannot be translation
Samuel Johnson
Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre
Samuel Johnson
In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.
Samuel Johnson
The maxim of Cleobulus, Mediocrity is best, has been long considered a universal principle, extending through the whole compass of life and nature. The experience of every age seems to have given it new confirmation, and to show that nothing, however specious or alluring, is pursued with propriety or enjoyed with safety beyond certain limits.
Samuel Johnson
I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to he right.
Samuel Johnson
Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
Samuel Johnson
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
Samuel Johnson
Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.
Samuel Johnson
Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Samuel Johnson
To a poet nothing can be useless.
Samuel Johnson
Assertion is not argument to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.
Samuel Johnson
