"Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 12 of 88)
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"Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity."
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"How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consigned, Our own felicity we make or find. With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, Glides the smooth current of domestic joy."
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"Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
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"Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything."
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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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"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
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"Marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship, and there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and he must expect to be wretched, who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness that regard which only virtue and piety can claim."
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"It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality."
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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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"Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult."
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"Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger."
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"He that teaches us anything which we knew not before is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master."
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"In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe."
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"The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England."
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"Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanics laughs at strength."
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"Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion."
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"A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth."
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"When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."
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"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
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