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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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Bookseller
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Literary Critic
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
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Perseverance
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Delightful
Attention
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Resolution
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
Samuel Johnson
The difference between coarse and refined abuse is the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow.
Samuel Johnson
Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.
Samuel Johnson
The perfect day for quitting is not real. It will never come, so might as well start today
Samuel Johnson
A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.
Samuel Johnson
Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
Samuel Johnson
To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.
Samuel Johnson
It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood.
Samuel Johnson
To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others
Samuel Johnson
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
Samuel Johnson
An exotic and irrational entertainment.
Samuel Johnson
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
Samuel Johnson
A voyage to the moon, however romantick and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century
Samuel Johnson
You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.
Samuel Johnson
So scanty is our present allowance of happiness that in many situations life could scarcely be supported if hope were not allowed to relieve the present hour by pleasures borrowed from the future.
Samuel Johnson
Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.
Samuel Johnson
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Samuel Johnson
The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
Samuel Johnson
The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.
Samuel Johnson