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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.

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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A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.
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The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.
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There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.
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The size of a man's understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth.
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Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
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The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay.
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Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.
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..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.
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The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits
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It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
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It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
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No man hates him at whom he can laugh.
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Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
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In civilized society external advantages make us more respected. A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one. You may analyze this and say, What is there in it? But that will avail you nothing, for it is a part of a general system.
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Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
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