"Friendship may well deserve the sacrifice of pleasure, though not of conscience."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 66 of 88)
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"Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment."
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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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"Ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure ... if it is not rising into pleasure will be falling towards pain."
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"Among other pleasing errors of young minds is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from themselves, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines everyone that approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy."
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"Quack: A boastful pretender to arts which he does not understand. A vain boastful pretender to physick; An artful, tricking practitioner in physick."
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"To proportion the eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions."
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"Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour."
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"True enjoyments also keep people from vice."
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"We often look with indifference on the successive parts of something that, if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion."
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"Nobody can be taught faster than he can learn."
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"Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour."
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"Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant"
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"A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience."
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"The joy of life is variety."
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"A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion; he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed."
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"To wipe all tears from off all faces is a task too hard for mortals; but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and neglected with equal disregard of policy and goodness."
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"Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible."
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"We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself."
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"It is to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness."
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