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Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim and when you are calculating, calculate.

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
Madam
Calculate
Calculating
Sincerity

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Diffidence may check resolution and obstruct performance, but compensates its embarrassments by more important advantages it conciliates the proud, and softens the severe averts envy from excellence, and censure from miscarriage.
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People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.
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An exotic and irrational entertainment.
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There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
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A man who always talks for fame never can be pleasing. The man who talks to unburthen his mind is the man to delight you.
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There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?
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Those whose abilities or knowledge incline them most to deviate from the general round of life are recalled from eccentricity by the laws of their existence.
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The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.
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Every human being whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.
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Sir, it is wrong to stir up law-suits but when once it is certain that a law-suit is to go on, there is nothing wrong in a lawyer's endeavouring that he shall have the benefit, rather than another.
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You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
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The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.
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Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world.
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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
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It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman.
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Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
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Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
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Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.
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