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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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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
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Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Writing
Rarely
Developed
Ease
Complete
Studiously
Indeed
Affectation
Habit
Distinguish
Style
Afterwards
Easy
Writes
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Care that is once enter'd into the breast Will have the whole possession ere it rest.
Samuel Johnson
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.
Samuel Johnson
The vicious count their years virtuous, their acts.
Samuel Johnson
To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.
Samuel Johnson
Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.
Samuel Johnson
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.
Samuel Johnson
The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species to remark general properties and large appearances.
Samuel Johnson
Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Samuel Johnson
No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance.
Samuel Johnson
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson
If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.
Samuel Johnson
The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.
Samuel Johnson
What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.
Samuel Johnson
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
Samuel Johnson
It is one of the maxims of the civil law, that definitions are hazardous.
Samuel Johnson
Inquiries into the heart are not for man.
Samuel Johnson
The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and stigmatized, before they have the sanction of antiquity conferred upon them, and become precedents of indisputable authority.
Samuel Johnson
Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.
Samuel Johnson
He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.
Samuel Johnson
