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The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species to remark general properties and large appearances.

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
Politician
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Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Individual
Properties
Business
Appearances
Examine
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Species
Large
General
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Remark

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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I fly from pleasure, said the prince, because pleasure has ceased to please I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others.
Samuel Johnson
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To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.
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Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.
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Attack is the reaction. I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.
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Love is only one of many passions.
Samuel Johnson
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There is a certain degree of temptation which will overcome any virtue. Now, in so far as you approach temptation to a man, you do him an injury and, if he is overcome, you share his guilt.
Samuel Johnson
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By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.
Samuel Johnson
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Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.
Samuel Johnson
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The great effect of friendship is beneficence, yet by the first act of uncommon kindness it is endangered.
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The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.
Samuel Johnson
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If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
Samuel Johnson
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Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
Samuel Johnson
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He that accepts protection, stipulates obedience. We have always protected the Americans we may therefore subject them to government.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
Samuel Johnson
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Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.
Samuel Johnson
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Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from learning to be wise. There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,- Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
Samuel Johnson
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It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
Samuel Johnson
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I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
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The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Samuel Johnson
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This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.
Samuel Johnson