"The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 28 of 88)
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"I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth."
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"Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity; a combination of a passion which all endeavor to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest."
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"The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends."
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"The two offices of memory are collection and distribution."
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"If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards."
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"Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature."
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"A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him."
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"Repentance, however difficult to be practiced, is, if it be explained without superstition, easily understood. Repentance is the relinquishment of any practice from the conviction that it has offended God."
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"Distance either of time or place is sufficient to reconcile weak minds to wonderful relations."
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"At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest."
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"Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy."
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"The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate"
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"Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect."
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"A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write. The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them."
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"We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself."
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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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"A man will turn over half a library to make one book."
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"Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic."
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"To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements."
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