Samuel Johnson Quotes
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The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something to-morrow which I never saw before.
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I'll come no more behind your scenes, David Garrick; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.
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It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.
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I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
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EXCISE - A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
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His conversation does not show the minute-hand, but he strikes the hour very correctly.
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Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
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In misery's darkest cavern known,His useful care was ever nighWhere hopeless anguish pour'd his groan,And lonely want retir'd to die.
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Shakspeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven: but this does not refute my general assertion.
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I Boswell happened to say, it would be terrible if he should not find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in so dull a place. JOHNSON: 'Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here.'
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For patience, sov'reign o'er transmuted ill.
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Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
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Declamation roared, while Passion slept.
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A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
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I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lies.
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Goldsmith, however, was a man who whatever he wrote, did it better than any other man could do.
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That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.
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Then with no throbs of fiery pain,No cold gradations of decay,Death broke at once the vital chain,And freed his soul the nearest way.
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You see they'd have fitted him to a T.
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A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
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NETWORK - Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.
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A very unclubable man.
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It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.
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Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving.