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Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre

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
Dr. Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.
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It is better a man should be abused than forgotten.
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Conjecture as to things useful, is good but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle.
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Where there is no difficulty there is no praise.
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I do not see, Sir, that it is reasonable for a man to be angry at another, whom a woman has preferred to him but angry he is, no doubt and he is loath to be angry at himself.
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The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.
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No knowledge is useless, with the exception of heraldry.
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Wealth is nothing in itself it is not useful but when it departs from us.
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We have now learned that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it.
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Social sorrow loses half its pain.
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A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
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An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
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Discord generally operates in little things it is inflamed ... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.
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Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
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Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
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Such is the constitution of Man that labor may be said to be its own re-ward.
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As the greatest liar tells more truths than falsehoods, so may it be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.
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Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
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As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.
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Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else.
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