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Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour.

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
World
Enters
Prejudices
Favour
Prejudice
Youth
Happy

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This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
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Men seldom give pleasure when they are not pleased themselves.
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Life, however short, is made still shorter by waste of time.
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The drama's laws the drama's patrons give. For we that live to please must please to live.
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Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
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It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God whether God is just whether this life is the only state of existence.
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The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside
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A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.
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He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
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Too much vigor in the beginning of an undertaking often intercepts and prevents the steadiness and perseverance always necessary in the conduct of a complicated scheme.
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The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
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When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
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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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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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Don't tell me of deception a lie is a lie, whether it be a lie to the eye or a lie to the ear.
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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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The end of writing is to instruct the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.
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Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.
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Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
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The gloomy and the resentful are always found among those who have nothing to do or who do nothing.
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