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Example is always more efficacious than precept.

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
Precept
Statistics
Example
Always
Efficacious

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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Remember that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.
Samuel Johnson
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You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
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Avarice is a uniform and tractable vice other intellectual distempers are different in different constitutions of mind. That which soothes the pride of one will offend the pride of another, but to the favor of the covetous bring money, and nothing is denied.
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Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
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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.
Samuel Johnson
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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
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To wipe all tears from off all faces is a task too hard for mortals but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and neglected with equal disregard of policy and goodness.
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Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science.
Samuel Johnson
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Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.
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An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
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Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.
Samuel Johnson
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In discussing these exceptions from the course of nature, the first question is, whether the fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected.
Samuel Johnson
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Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.
Samuel Johnson
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Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.
Samuel Johnson
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The dependant who cultivates delicacy in himself very little consults his own tranquillity.
Samuel Johnson
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To a poet nothing can be useless.
Samuel Johnson
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You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.
Samuel Johnson
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How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Samuel Johnson
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The future is purchased by the present.
Samuel Johnson
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The process is the reality.
Samuel Johnson