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Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Overcome
Faint
Overcoming
Performed
Despair
Idleness
Already
Attempts
Fear
Promote
Often
Defeated
Forbear
May
Showing
Timidity
Without
Endeavor
Endeavors
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
There is nothing so minute, or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.
Samuel Johnson
His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void And sure the Eternal Master found The single talent well employed.
Samuel Johnson
It is however, reasonable, to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance towards it, though we know it never can be reached.
Samuel Johnson
That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.
Samuel Johnson
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
Samuel Johnson
The mischief of flattery is, not that it persuades any man that he is what he is not, but that it suppresses the influence of honest ambition, by raising an opinion that honour may be gained without the toil of merit.
Samuel Johnson
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
Samuel Johnson
Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.
Samuel Johnson
Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls.
Samuel Johnson
All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.
Samuel Johnson
...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.
Samuel Johnson
No one ever became great by imitation.
Samuel Johnson
Men become friends by a community of pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution.
Samuel Johnson
A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.
Samuel Johnson
To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar
Samuel Johnson
It is better a man should be abused than forgotten.
Samuel Johnson
Falsehood always endeavors to copy the mien and attitude of truth.
Samuel Johnson
