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What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.
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
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
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Asks
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
High people, sir, are the best take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.
Samuel Johnson
To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.
Samuel Johnson
Modern writers are the moons of literature they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
Samuel Johnson
The insolence of wealth will creep out.
Samuel Johnson
The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.
Samuel Johnson
If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
Samuel Johnson
Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.
Samuel Johnson
It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
Samuel Johnson
Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.
Samuel Johnson
Who left nothing of authorship untouched, and touched nothing which he did not adorn. [Lat., Qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.]
Samuel Johnson
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Samuel Johnson
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.
Samuel Johnson
An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
Samuel Johnson
Languages are the pedigree of nations.
Samuel Johnson
Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves
Samuel Johnson
Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
Samuel Johnson
The fortitude which has encountered no dangers, that prudence which has surmounted no difficulties, that integrity which has been attacked by no temptation, can at best be considered but as gold not yet brought to the test, of which therefore the true value cannot be assigned.
Samuel Johnson
There is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber.
Samuel Johnson
Labor's face is wrinkled with the wind, and swarthy with the sun.
Samuel Johnson
He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
Samuel Johnson
