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You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Writing
Critics
Made
Tragedy
Make
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Trade
Scold
Though
Carpenter
Write
Table
Cannot
Abuse
May
Tables

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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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In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
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Art hath an enemy called ignorance.
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He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
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Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.
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The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.
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Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.
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Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.
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Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.
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The mischief of flattery is, not that it persuades any man that he is what he is not, but that it suppresses the influence of honest ambition, by raising an opinion that honour may be gained without the toil of merit.
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You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
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Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.
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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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No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.
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Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
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He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
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Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.
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To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them for they prove, at least, our power, and show that our favour is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood.
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