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Sir, there is no end of negative criticism.

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
Criticism
Negative
Ends

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Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.
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It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.
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Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood it is the crime of cowards.
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The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.
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I have adopted the Roman sentiment, that it is more honorable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy.
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A cow is a very good animal in the field but we turn her out of a garden.
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To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.
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Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, by the advantage which licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.
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Commerce can never be at a stop while one man wants what another can supply and credit will never be denied, while it is likely to be repaid with profit.
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Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.
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If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
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You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
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The future is purchased by the present.
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We are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.
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It is to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness.
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From all our observations we may collect with certainty, that misery is the lot of man, but cannot discover in what particular condition it will find most alleviations.
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If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.
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There is no idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business, and by making the loiterer imagine that he has something to do which must not be neglected, keeps him in perpetual agitation, and hurries him rapidly from place to place.
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...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.
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Still we love The evil we do, until we suffer it.
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