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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

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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
Pain
Pity
Exclusion
Feelings
Solitude
Gloomy
Others
Exciting
Adding
States
Marriage
Pains
Balm
Live
Mankind
Retreat
Celibacy
Without
Feeling
Pleasures
Afflicted
Many
Pleasure
Sympathy
Felicity
State
Fortunate
Tasting

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Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.
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From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,- Path, motive, guide, original, and end.
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When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life for there is in London all that life can afford.
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It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.
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All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.
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I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.
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A vow is a snare for sin
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Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
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If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
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I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to he right.
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The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man.
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As the faculty of writing has chiefly been a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon the women.
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It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.
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Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.
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The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.
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Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
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He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
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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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There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
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A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him.
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