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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
Indeed
Affectation
Habit
Distinguish
Style
Afterwards
Easy
Writes
Writing
Rarely
Developed
Ease
Complete
Studiously
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
Samuel Johnson
Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.
Samuel Johnson
The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.
Samuel Johnson
I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
Samuel Johnson
You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.
Samuel Johnson
No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.
Samuel Johnson
Thought is always troublesome to him who lives without his own approbation.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.
Samuel Johnson
Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.
Samuel Johnson
He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
Samuel Johnson
Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Samuel Johnson
I will take no more physick, not even my opiates for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.
Samuel Johnson
If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
Samuel Johnson
As a madman is apt to think himself grown suddenly great, so he that grows suddenly great is apt to borrow a little from the madman.
Samuel Johnson
Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Samuel Johnson
Wickedness is always easier than virtue for it takes the short cut to everything.
Samuel Johnson
Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding.
Samuel Johnson
If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
Samuel Johnson
I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.
Samuel Johnson
