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It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood.

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
Things
Claim
Privilege
Winter
Privileges
Claims
Endeavour
Spring
Unite
Childhood
Retain
Age
Unjust
Play
Hopeless

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Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.
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Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.
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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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Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.
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Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life.
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He who endeavors to please must appear pleased.
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The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.
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He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.
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Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them.
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Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know That life protracted is protracted woe.
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Assertion is not argument to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.
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Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
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The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.
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Wickedness is always easier than virtue for it takes the short cut to everything.
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Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order. - John V. Lindsay No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it.
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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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The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.
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That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.
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Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.
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