Samuel Johnson quotes:

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  • He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

  • Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

  • The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

  • No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

  • A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

  • Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

  • Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

  • To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

  • There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

  • If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

  • Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

  • It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

  • A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

  • By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.

  • It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

  • Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

  • Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

  • What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

  • 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.

  • The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

  • I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

  • I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

  • Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

  • Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

  • I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

  • Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

  • Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

  • The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

  • The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

  • There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

  • 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.

  • It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

  • Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

  • Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

  • Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

  • Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

  • Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

  • When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

  • Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

  • My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.

  • There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.

  • When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

  • Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

  • The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

  • The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

  • All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

  • Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

  • Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

  • Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

  • Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and... the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

  • It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

  • Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

  • The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

  • Wine gives a man nothing... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

  • One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

  • No man was ever great by imitation.

  • Love is only one of many passions.

  • No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

  • The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

  • By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.

  • Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

  • Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

  • The future is purchased by the present.

  • It is better to live rich than to die rich.

  • Nothing [] will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.

  • A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation

  • Order is a lovely nymph, the child of Beauty and Wisdom; her attendants are Comfort, Neatness, and Activity; her abode is the valley of happiness: she is always to be found when sought for, and never appears so lovely as when contrasted with her opponent, Disorder.

  • Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

  • To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which if not a virtue, is the groundwork of a virtue.

  • By forbearing to do what may innocently be done, we may add hourly new vigor to resolution.

  • Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

  • In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

  • When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed

  • Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

  • Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

  • Such is the constitution of man that labour may be styled its own reward; nor will any external incitements be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body.

  • When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

  • No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

  • If, sir, men were all virtuous, I should with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither wall, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security.

  • Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.

  • A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

  • There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

  • Allegories drawn to great length will always break.

  • In civilized society external advantages make us more respected. A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one. You may analyze this and say, What is there in it? But that will avail you nothing, for it is a part of a general system.

  • The hour of reformation is always delayed; every delay gives vice another opportunity of fortifying itself by habit.

  • Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

  • The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in a few words.

  • The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.

  • Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

  • Among the numerous requisites that must concur to complete an author, few are of more importance than an early entrance into the living world. The seed of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public. Argumentation may be taught in colleges, and theories formed in retirement; but the artifice of embellishment and the powers of attraction can be gained only by a general converse.

  • To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft.

  • To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.

  • No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

  • Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it

  • Avarice is always poor.

  • Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

  • They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

  • I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night, and then the nap takes me.

  • Bias and impartiality is in the eye of the beholder.

  • It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

  • When emulation leads us to strive for self-elevation by merit alone, and not by belittling another, then it is one of the grandest possible incentives to action.

  • I would injure no man, and should provoke no resentment. I would relieve every distress, and should enjoy the benedictions of gratitude. I would choose my friends among the wise and my wife among the virtuous, and therefore should be in no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should by my care be learned and pious, and would repay to my age what their childhood had received.

  • Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

  • No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

  • Of all the griefs that harass the distress'd, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest; Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.

  • The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea.

  • Every other enjoyment malice may destroy; every other panegyric envy may withhold; but no human power can deprive the boaster of his own encomiums.

  • We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

  • Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

  • Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.

  • Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.

  • One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

  • A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

  • The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.

  • Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

  • Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats, And ask no questions but the price of votes.

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