Samuel Johnson Quotes

It very seldom happens to a man that his business is his pleasure.

The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.

Mutual cowardice keeps us in peace.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.

Virtue is too often merely local.

Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.

To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

Cowardice encroaches fast upon such as spend their lives in company of persons higher than themselves.

Life protracted is protracted woe.

Men are most powerfully affected by those evils which themselves feel, or which appear before their own eyes.

Art hath an enemy called ignorance.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

Nay, Sir, those who write in them, write well, in order to be paid well.

Nothing can be truly great which is not right.

In proportion as our cares are employed upon the future, they are abstracted from the present, from the only time which we can call our own, and of which, if we neglect the apparent duties to make provision against visionary attacks, we shall certainly counteract our own purpose.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

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

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

Life is short. The sooner that a man begins to enjoy his wealth the better.

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.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience.

A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one.

Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.

The luster of diamonds is invigorated by the interposition of darker bodies; the lights of a picture are created by the shades; the highest pleasure which nature has indulged to sensitive perception is that of rest after fatigue.

Differences, we know, are never so effectually laid asleep as by some common calamity; an enemy unites all to whom he threatens danger.

...a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes any other use of his enlargement, than to do, with greater cunning, what he did before with less.

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.

It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.

To build is to be robbed.

The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown to a beggar with intention to break his head and he picks it up and buy victuals with it, the physical effect is good. But with respect to me the action is very wrong.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.

Lawful and settled authority is very seldom resisted when it is well employed.

Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre

Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet.

Truth has no gradations; nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

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.

I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.