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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.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Bookseller
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Literary Critic
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
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Grows
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
It is however, reasonable, to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance towards it, though we know it never can be reached.
Samuel Johnson
Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.
Samuel Johnson
Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.
Samuel Johnson
The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
Samuel Johnson
Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.
Samuel Johnson
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
Samuel Johnson
To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it and seeing one is quite enough.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.
Samuel Johnson
There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
Samuel Johnson
The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.
Samuel Johnson
Still we love The evil we do, until we suffer it.
Samuel Johnson
A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
Samuel Johnson
The vicious count their years virtuous, their acts.
Samuel Johnson
Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
Samuel Johnson
Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.
Samuel Johnson
It is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. You may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learned them both.
Samuel Johnson
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.
Samuel Johnson
