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We may have uneasy feelings for seeing a creature in distress without pity for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them.

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
Seeing
Wish
Relieve
Feelings
Uneasy
May
Distress
Without
Creature
Pity
Creatures
Unless

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The arguments for purity of life fail of their due influence, not because they have been considered and confuted, but because they have been passed over without consideration.
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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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No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it.
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Such is the constitution of man that labour may be styled its own reward nor will any external incitements be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body.
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The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
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When a man feel the reprehension of a friend seconded by his own heart, he is easily heated into resentment.
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Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.
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A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.
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Hunger is never delicate they who are seldom gorged to the full with praise may be safely fed with gross compliments, for the appetite must be satisfied before it is disgusted.
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All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
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Babies do not want to hear about babies they like to be told of giants and castles.
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The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.
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He that has too much to do will do something wrong.
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Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.
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Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.
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The process is the reality.
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In all pleasures hope is a considerable part.
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Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.
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As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.
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Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained
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