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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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Essayist
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
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Language is the dress of thought and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy
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Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.
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I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.
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A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.
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To be of no Church is dangerous.
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Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.
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While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
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Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?
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Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.
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Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
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He that has too much to do will do something wrong.
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Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
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Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.
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Poverty has, in large cities, very different appearances it is often concealed in splendour, and often in extravagance.
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I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
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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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Those that have done nothing in life, are not qualified to judge of those that have done little
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All envy is proportionate to desire we are uneasy at the attainments of another, according as we think our own happiness would be advanced by the addition of that which he withholds from us.
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Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
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An exotic and irrational entertainment.
Samuel Johnson