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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

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.
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Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things, when they are shown their form or told their use.
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Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
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When there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.
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Whatever you have spend less.
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Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.
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Consider what importance to society the chastity of women is. Upon that all the property in the world depends. We hang a thief for stealing a sheep but the unchastity of a woman transfers sheep and farm and all from the right owner.
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All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.
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Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet.
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As he that lives longest lives but a little while, every man may be certain that he has no time to waste. The duties of life are commensurate to its duration and every day brings its task, which, if neglected, is doubled on the morrow.
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An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
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It is to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness.
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Sir, it is wrong to stir up law-suits but when once it is certain that a law-suit is to go on, there is nothing wrong in a lawyer's endeavouring that he shall have the benefit, rather than another.
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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.
Samuel Johnson
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Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.
Samuel Johnson
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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.
Samuel Johnson
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If we will have the kindness of others, we must endure their follies.
Samuel Johnson
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When desperate ills demand a speedy cure, Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly.
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Never speak of a man in his own presence. It is always indelicate, and may be offensive .
Samuel Johnson
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Truth has no gradations nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true.
Samuel Johnson