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Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
Samuel Johnson -
His conversation does not show the minute-hand, but he strikes the hour very correctly.
Samuel Johnson
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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.
Samuel Johnson -
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Samuel Johnson -
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
Samuel Johnson -
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.
Samuel Johnson -
To a poet nothing can be useless.
Samuel Johnson -
Declamation roared, while Passion slept.
Samuel Johnson
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CLUB - An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.
Samuel Johnson -
He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning.
Samuel Johnson -
It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.
Samuel Johnson -
He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.
Samuel Johnson -
It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.
Samuel Johnson -
Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.
Samuel Johnson
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Philips, whose touch harmonious could removeThe pangs of guilty power and hapless love!Rest here, distress'd by poverty no more;Here find that calm thou gav'st so oft before;Sleep undisturb'd within this peaceful shrine,Till angels wake thee with a note like thine!
Samuel Johnson -
The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something to-morrow which I never saw before.
Samuel Johnson -
A man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.
Samuel Johnson -
Let us take a patriot, where we can meet him; and, that we may not flatter ourselves by false appearances, distinguish those marks which are certain, from those which may deceive; for a man may have the external appearance of a patriot, without the constituent qualities; as false coins have often lustre, though they want weight.
Samuel Johnson -
Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition.
Samuel Johnson -
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
Samuel Johnson
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You see they'd have fitted him to a T.
Samuel Johnson -
Sir, you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
Samuel Johnson -
GRUBSTREET - The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.
Samuel Johnson -
Superfluous lags the vet'ran on the stage.
Samuel Johnson