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We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

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
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
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Learn that the present hour alone is man's.
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No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.
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Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
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The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
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I am a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant whose kettle has scarcely time to cool who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.
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In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
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Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.
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Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
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Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.
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Round numbers are always false.
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A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation, or remote enquiries.
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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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The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of a giddy libertine or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.
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All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
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Thought is always troublesome to him who lives without his own approbation.
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...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.
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An exotic and irrational entertainment.
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When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
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Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands.
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Foppery is never cured it is the bad stamina of the mind, which, like those of the body, are never rectified once a coxcomb always a coxcomb.
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