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A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.

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
Successive
Afterwards
Falsehood
Sufficient
Men
Diffused
Innocently
Falsehoods

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Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained
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Every man has something to do which he neglects, every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.
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When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.
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As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness if often covered by turbulence and hurry.
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It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
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I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.
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There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame.
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Never believe extraordinary characters which you hear of people. Depend upon it, they are exaggerated. You do not see one man shoot a great deal higher than another.
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Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.
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Everybody knows worse of himself than he knows of other men.
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The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.
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When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.
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If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
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The true art of memory is the art of attention.
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He that never labors may know the pains of idleness, but not the pleasures.
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There is nothing so minute, or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.
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The whole power of cunning is privative to say nothing, and to do nothing , is the utmost of its reach. Yet men, thus narrow by nature and mean by art, are sometimes able to rise by the miscarriages of bravery and the openness of integrity, and, watching failures and snatching opportunities, obtain advantages which belong to higher characters.
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Happiness, said he, must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty.
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Men have been wise in many different modes but they have always laughed the same way.
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A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
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