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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
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Important
Checks
Softens
Excellence
Avert
Envy
Censure
Performance
Embarrassment
Embarrassments
Performances
Advantages
Compensates
Advantage
Severe
Obstruct
Proud
Resolution
Miscarriage
May
Check
Diffidence

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Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
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An old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.
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Discord generally operates in little things it is inflamed ... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.
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I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
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There are occasions on which all apology is rudeness.
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Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves
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What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
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If the guardian or the mother Tell the woes of willful waste, Scorn their counsel and their pother, You can hang or drown at last.
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Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
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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.
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I am willing to love all of mankind, except an American.
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If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary be not idle.
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The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart with.
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As the faculty of writing has chiefly been a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon the women.
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Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.
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The eye of the mind, like that of the body, can only extend its view to new objects, by losing sight of those which are now before it.
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Sir, if a man has a mind to prance, he must study at Christ Church and All Souls.
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He to whom many objects of pursuit arise at the same time, will frequently hesitate between different desires till a rival has precluded him, or change his course as new attractions prevail, and harass himself without advancing.
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To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar
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