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Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who while he was chill was harmless but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison.

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
Poison
Viper
Gave
Vipers
Strength
Exerted
Desire
Harmless
Every
Bosom
Bosoms
Chill
Warmth

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Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life.
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Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
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He that accepts protection, stipulates obedience. We have always protected the Americans we may therefore subject them to government.
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Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.
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Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new.
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Life protracted is protracted woe.
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To excite opposition and inflame malevolence is the unhappy privilege of courage made arrogant by consciousness of strength.
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He that is pushing his predecessors into the gulf of obscurity, cannot but sometimes suspect, that he must himself sink in like manner, and, as he stands upon the same precipice, be swept away with the same violence.
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Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.
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To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
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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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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
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