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Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.

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
Examination
Falsehood
Fraud
Invites
Dread
Truth

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In all pleasures hope is a considerable part.
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Security will produce danger.
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Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
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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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Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
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To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
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We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
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There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.
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Every man is of importance to himself.
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A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.
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Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant
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Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
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Glory, the casual gift of thoughtless crowds! Glory, the bribe of avaricious virtue!
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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.
Samuel Johnson
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Misery is caused for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, which canker enjoyment, and undermine security. The visit of an invader is necessarily rare, but domestic animosities allow no cessation.
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Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.
Samuel Johnson
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How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consigned, Our own felicity we make or find. With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
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Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct.
Samuel Johnson
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Sir, it is wrong to stir up law-suits but when once it is certain that a law-suit is to go on, there is nothing wrong in a lawyer's endeavouring that he shall have the benefit, rather than another.
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