"Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven, The noble mind's delight and pride, To men and angels only given, To all the lower world denied."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 82 of 88)
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"He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey."
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"Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life."
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"He that never labors may know the pains of idleness, but not the pleasures."
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"Occupation alone is happiness."
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"Get together a hundred or two men, however sensible they may be, and you are very likely to have a mob."
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"As the faculty of writing has chiefly been a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon the women."
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"I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of."
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"Consultation and compliance can conduce little to the perfection of any literary performance; for whoever is so doubtful of his own abilities as to encourage the remarks of others, will find himself every day embarrassed with new difficulties, and will harass his mind, in vain, with the hopeless labour of uniting heterogeneous ideas, digesting independent hints, and collecting into one point the several rays of borrowed light, emitted often with contrary directions."
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"It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman."
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"It is the condition of our present state to see more than we can attain; the exactest vigilance and caution can never maintain a single day of unmingled innocence."
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"It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion or deformed by wickedness. If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shows all that presents itself without discrimination."
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"I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy."
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"Nay, Sir, those who write in them, write well, in order to be paid well."
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"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators."
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"Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy."
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"Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else."
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"Sir, if a man has a mind to prance, he must study at Christ Church and All Souls."
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"Hunting was the labour of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England."
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"It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age."
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