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Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected that which elevates must always surprise.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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What is said upon a subject is gathered from an hundred people.
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Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.
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To excite opposition and inflame malevolence is the unhappy privilege of courage made arrogant by consciousness of strength.
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Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.
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The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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Luxury, so far as it reaches the people, will do good to the race of people it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury for, as I said before it can reach but a very few.
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As any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice.
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I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.
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Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused
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His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void And sure the Eternal Master found The single talent well employed.
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About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right.
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Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
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I fly from pleasure, said the prince, because pleasure has ceased to please I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others.
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The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of a giddy libertine or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.
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The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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Gayety is to good-humor as perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits the other recreates and revives them.
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To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.
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Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
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All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.
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