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An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Meanness
Infallible
Characteristic
Characteristics
Cruelty
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We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.
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This is my history like all other histories, a narrative of misery.
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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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Applause abates diligence.
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Those authors are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence.
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Is not a patron one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?
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To be free it is not enough to beat the system, one must beat the system every day
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Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.
Samuel Johnson
Language is the dress of thought and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy
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What is the reason that women servants ... have much lower wages than men servants ... when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?
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Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.
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If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
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High people, sir, are the best take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
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If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
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Since life itself is uncertain, nothing which has life for its basis can boast much stability.
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He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
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That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.
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People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.
Samuel Johnson
Truth has no gradations nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true.
Samuel Johnson
