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I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

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
Ten
Rest
Circumference
Venture
Learning
Kingdom
Within
Kingdoms
Science
Miles
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London

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I am a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant whose kettle has scarcely time to cool who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.
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To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made without, a comparison but it has never been my fortune to find, either in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have, with equal blindness, hated their country.
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.
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To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.
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Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.
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Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
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If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.
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All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor.
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People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.
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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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Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
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It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
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As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.
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If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur.
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Distance either of time or place is sufficient to reconcile weak minds to wonderful relations.
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He who writes much will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted.
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Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the association pleasing, and give probable hopes that they shall be disciplined by an easy separation...to die is the fate of man but to die with lingering anguish is generally his folly.
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What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.
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I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.
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