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Diffidence may check resolution and obstruct performance, but compensates its embarrassments by more important advantages it conciliates the proud, and softens the severe averts envy from excellence, and censure from miscarriage.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
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Literary Critic
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
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Diffidence
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Softens
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Envy
Censure
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new.
Samuel Johnson
Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
Samuel Johnson
Let us take a patriot, where we can meet him and, that we may not flatter ourselves by false appearances, distinguish those marks which are certain, from those which may deceive for a man may have the external appearance of a patriot, without the constituent qualities as false coins have often lustre, though they want weight.
Samuel Johnson
The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay.
Samuel Johnson
Men have been wise in many different modes but they have always laughed the same way.
Samuel Johnson
Applause abates diligence.
Samuel Johnson
The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man.
Samuel Johnson
To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.
Samuel Johnson
What is good only because it pleases cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please.
Samuel Johnson
People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.
Samuel Johnson
To purchase Heaven has gold the power? Can gold remove the mortal hour? In life can love be bought with gold? Are friendship's pleasures to be sold? No--all that's worth a wish--a thought, Fair virtue gives unbribed, unbought. Cease then on trash thy hopes to bind, Let nobler views engage thy mind.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
It is better a man should be abused than forgotten.
Samuel Johnson
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
Samuel Johnson
This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.
Samuel Johnson
Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
Samuel Johnson
The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind.
Samuel Johnson
Critics, like the rest of mankind, are very frequently misled by interest.
Samuel Johnson
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Samuel Johnson
