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Debt / Borrow / Loan
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Small debts are like small gun shot; they are rattling around us on all sides and one can scarcely escape being wounded. Large debts are like canons, they produce a loud noise, but are of little danger.
-Samuel Johnson
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Deception/Lying
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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.
-Samuel Johnson
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We are inclined to believe those whom we don not know because they have never deceived us.
-Samuel Johnson
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Desires
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Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
-Samuel Johnson
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Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.
-Samuel Johnson
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Determination
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If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
-Samuel Johnson
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Doubt
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He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
-Samuel Johnson
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Suspicion is most often useless pain.
-Samuel Johnson
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Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
-Samuel Johnson
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Effort
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What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
-Samuel Johnson
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Entertainment
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A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.
-Samuel Johnson
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Enthusiasm
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The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.
-Samuel Johnson
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Envy / Jealousy
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His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.
-Samuel Johnson
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Epitaphs
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In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
-Samuel Johnson
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Equality
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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.
-Samuel Johnson
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It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
-Samuel Johnson
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It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
-Samuel Johnson
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So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.
-Samuel Johnson
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Evangelism
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A man who is good enough to go to heaven is not good enough to be a clergyman.
-Samuel Johnson
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Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.
-Samuel Johnson
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Evil
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The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things -- the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
-Samuel Johnson
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Example
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They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.
-Samuel Johnson
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Excess
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As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors; nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.
-Samuel Johnson
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Exercise
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Exercise is labor without weariness.
-Samuel Johnson
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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.
-Samuel Johnson, Rambler (London) no. 47. repr. in Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 3, eds. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (1969), August 28, 1750
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Books by and about Samuel Johnson