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Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.

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
Consists
Manners
Profession
Mark
General
Particular
Good
Breeding
Elegance

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A mere literary man is a dull man a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.
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Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.
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The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.
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He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.
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Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
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By those who look close to the ground dirt will be seen. I hope I see things from a greater distance.
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Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.
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Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.
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The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death.
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We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor
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Every man wishes to be wise, and they who cannot be wise are almost always cunning.
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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.
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If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur.
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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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The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in a few words.
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There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
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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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Unless a woman has an amorous heart, she is a dull companion.
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Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
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I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
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