Samuel Johnson Quotes
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Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
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A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
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There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.
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He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
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A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
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Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.
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My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.
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Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
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Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
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The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.
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Sir, he Bolingbroke was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger at his death.
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The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.
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Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
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Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
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All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
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Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
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Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.
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A lady once asked him how he came to define 'pastern', the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as might be expected, he at once answered, 'Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.'
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There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
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He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.
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I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
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Words are but the signs of ideas.
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Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.