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Merit rather enforces respect than attracts fondness.

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
Fondness
Attracts
Merit
Respect
Rather
Enforces

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I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
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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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There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
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A newswriter is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit.
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Art hath an enemy called ignorance.
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The belief of immortality is impressed upon all men, and all men act under an impression of it, however they may talk, and though, perhaps, they may be scarcely sensible of it.
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When a Man is tried of London, he is tired of life.
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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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When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
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In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.
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Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good. and A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives.
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A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company
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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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Philosophy has often attempted to repress insolence by asserting that all conditions are leveled by death a position which, however it may defect the happy, will seldom afford much comfort to the wretched.
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Wine gives a man nothing... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
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Yet reason frowns in war's unequal game, Where wasted nations raise a single name And mortgag'd states their grandsire's wreaths regret, From age to age in everlasting debt Wreaths which at last the dear-bought right convey To rust on medals, or on stones decay.
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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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All power of fancy over reason is a degree of madness.
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Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
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