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All imposture weakens confidence and chills benevolence.

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
Imposture
Chills
Weakens
Benevolence
Chill
Deceit
Confidence

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When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
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To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.
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Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
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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.
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Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
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A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.
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All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
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Was ever poet so trusted before?
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Every man has something to do which he neglects, every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.
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Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.
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I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
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..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.
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Consider what importance to society the chastity of women is. Upon that all the property in the world depends. We hang a thief for stealing a sheep but the unchastity of a woman transfers sheep and farm and all from the right owner.
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Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
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There is no book so poor that it would not be a prodigy if wholly made by a single man.
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He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.
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Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.
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As he that lives longest lives but a little while, every man may be certain that he has no time to waste. The duties of life are commensurate to its duration and every day brings its task, which, if neglected, is doubled on the morrow.
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God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?
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A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.
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