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We ought not to raise expectations which it is not in our power to satisfy.-It is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.

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
Flames
Raise
Smoke
Raises
Brightening
Expectations
Sinking
Ought
Pleasing
Power
Satisfy
Flame

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To be free it is not enough to beat the system, one must beat the system every day
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One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
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A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
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Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who while he was chill was harmless but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison.
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Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.
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Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?
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If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced if of ill-fortune, to be pitied and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
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Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.
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No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.
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If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
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Stand Firm for your country, and become a man Honour'd and lov'd: It were a noble life, To be found dead, embracing her.
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Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new.
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It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
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Condemned to Hope's delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts or slow decline Our social comforts drop away.
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Languages are the pedigree of nations.
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To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.
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Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, - judgement, to estimate things at their true value.
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Jesting, often, only proves a want of intellect.
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Life, however short, is made still shorter by waste of time.
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Those that have done nothing in life, are not qualified to judge of those that have done little
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