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The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Virtue
Lamenting
Business
Summons
Away
Deprivation
Life
Virtues
Calls
Useless
Grief
Exercise

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Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
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The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
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Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.
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No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.
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Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
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People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.
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Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.
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We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.
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Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.
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Pound St. Paul's Church into atoms, and consider any single atom it is to be sure, good for nothing but put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul's Church. So it is with human felicity, which is made up of many ingredients, each of which may be shown to be very insignificant.
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Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
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Glory, the casual gift of thoughtless crowds! Glory, the bribe of avaricious virtue!
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Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.
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Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance.
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Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.
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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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Poverty has, in large cities, very different appearances it is often concealed in splendour, and often in extravagance.
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To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it and seeing one is quite enough.
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Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
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