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Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
Samuel Johnson
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
All is not gold that glitters, as we have often been told and the adage is verified in your place and my favour but if what happens does not make us richer, we must bid it welcome, if it makes us wiser.
Samuel Johnson
If we will have the kindness of others, we must endure their follies.
Samuel Johnson
No man tells his opinion so freely as when he imagines it received with implicit veneration.
Samuel Johnson
A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.
Samuel Johnson
No wonder, Sir, that he is vain a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.
Samuel Johnson
Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?
Samuel Johnson
The first step to greatness is to be honest.
Samuel Johnson
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Samuel Johnson
We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor
Samuel Johnson
People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.
Samuel Johnson
In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.
Samuel Johnson
Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Samuel Johnson
Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.
Samuel Johnson
Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.
Samuel Johnson
I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
Samuel Johnson
I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.
Samuel Johnson
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.
Samuel Johnson
A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
Samuel Johnson
