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Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is but it is not easy to tell what it is.

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
Poetry
Easier
Easy
Tell
Light
Much

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There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.
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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.
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The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love, like being enlivened with champagne.
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Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
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Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.
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As all error is meanness, it is incumbent on every man who consults his own dignity, to retract it as soon as he discovers it.
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Falsehood always endeavors to copy the mien and attitude of truth.
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Then with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
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Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.
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The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.
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Reason elevates our thoughts as high as the stars, and leads us through the vast space of this mighty fabric yet it comes far short of the real extent of our corporeal being.
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People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.
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Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
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The size of a man's understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth.
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People seldom read a book which is given to them and few are given. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price. No man will send to buy a thing that costs even sixpence without an intention to read it.
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To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.
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Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
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Whatever you have spend less.
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Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
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A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one.
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