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What signifies protesting so against flattery when a person speaks well of one, it must either be true or false, you know if true, let us rejoice in his good opinion if he lies, it is a proof at least that he loves more to please me, than to sit s

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
Proof
Speak
Loves
Signifies
True
Lies
Protesting
Persons
Please
Flattery
Person
Either
Deceit
Wells
Least
Rejoice
Well
Opinion
Speaks
Must
False
Good
Lying

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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Occupation alone is happiness.
Samuel Johnson
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The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Samuel Johnson
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
Samuel Johnson
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Knock the 't' off the 'can't.'
Samuel Johnson
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Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost must always end in pain.
Samuel Johnson
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A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Samuel Johnson
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Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson
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Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.
Samuel Johnson
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When a Man is tried of London, he is tired of life.
Samuel Johnson
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Words are but the signs of ideas.
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.
Samuel Johnson
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I will take no more physick, not even my opiates for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.
Samuel Johnson
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If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced if of ill-fortune, to be pitied and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
Samuel Johnson
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Attack is the reaction. I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.
Samuel Johnson
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The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accidents.
Samuel Johnson
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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.
Samuel Johnson
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We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
Samuel Johnson
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So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.
Samuel Johnson
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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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It is in refinement and elegance that the civilized man differs from the savage.
Samuel Johnson