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We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.

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
Pain
Evanescence
Unwelcome
Pleasing
Images
Useful
Suffer
Equal
Suffering
Adhesion

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Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
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The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.
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If the guardian or the mother Tell the woes of willful waste, Scorn their counsel and their pother, You can hang or drown at last.
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In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.
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Every man, however hopeless his pretensions may appear, has some project by which he hopes to rise to reputation some art by which he imagines that the attention of the world will be attracted some quality, good or bad, which discriminates him from the common herd of mortals, and by which others may be persuaded to love, or compelled to fear him.
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Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.
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Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance.
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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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All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor.
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Falsehood always endeavors to copy the mien and attitude of truth.
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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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Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
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Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.
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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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There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets.
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If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion.
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Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
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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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Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire.
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The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
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