Quote

Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.

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
Giving
Please
Boast
Gaiety
Every
Humor
Fails
Offending
Believe
Animal
Spirits
Vegetable
Overpowers
Good
Pain
Vegetables
Revive
Recreates
Spirit
Seldom
Pleases
Revives
Power
Faculty
Faculties
Boasts
Doe
Weak
Fragrance
Perfumes
Give
Failing
Perfume
Principally

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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I would advise you, Sir, to study algebra, if you are not an adept already in it: your head would get less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbours about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.
Samuel Johnson
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Inquiries into the heart are not for man.
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The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
Samuel Johnson
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Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.
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It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.
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Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
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Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.
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Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.
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That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
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Such is the constitution of man that labour may be styled its own reward nor will any external incitements be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body.
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Fear naturally quickens the flight of guilt.
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Love is only one of many passions.
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The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.
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Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.
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Foppery is never cured it is the bad stamina of the mind, which, like those of the body, are never rectified once a coxcomb always a coxcomb.
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To do nothing is in everyone's power.
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I have already enjoyed too much give me something to desire.
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Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
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Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
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Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.
Samuel Johnson