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The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in a few words.
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
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
The first step to greatness is to be honest.
Samuel Johnson
Curiosity, like all other desires, produces pain as well as pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.
Samuel Johnson
The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.
Samuel Johnson
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Samuel Johnson
We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.
Samuel Johnson
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.
Samuel Johnson
No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.
Samuel Johnson
An exotic and irrational entertainment.
Samuel Johnson
It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
Samuel Johnson
Commerce can never be at a stop while one man wants what another can supply and credit will never be denied, while it is likely to be repaid with profit.
Samuel Johnson
Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.
Samuel Johnson
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.
Samuel Johnson
When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
Samuel Johnson
Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.
Samuel Johnson
The peculiar doctrine of Christianity is that of a universal sacrifice and perpetual propitiation.
Samuel Johnson
The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
Samuel Johnson
Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost must always end in pain.
Samuel Johnson
