Samuel Johnson Quotes

Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

Network. Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting debts in his passion, which his virtue obliges him to pay. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation.

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

Pride is seldom delicate, it will please itself with very mean advantages; and envy feels not its own happiness, but when it may be compared with the misery of others

I have adopted the Roman sentiment, that it is more honorable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy.

Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity.

A blaze first pleases and then tires the sight.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

Guilt once harbored in the conscious breast, intimidates the brave, degrades the great.

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

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

Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained

Example is always more efficacious than precept.

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.

There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect; compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition are names of happiness; yet this worst, this meanest fate, every one who dares to write has reason to fear.

What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.

A patriot is he whose public conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest

Justice is indispensably and universally necessary, and what is necessary must always be limited, uniform, and distinct

To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them; for they prove, at least, our power, and show that our favour is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood.

Pity is not natural to man. Children always are cruel. Savages are always cruel.

The present is never a happy state to any human being.

Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science.

From ignorance our comfort flows, the only wretched are the wise

He that travels in theory has no inconveniences.

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

Genius is that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

A person loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

But, perhaps, the flatterer is not often detected; for an honest mind is not apt to suspect, and no one exerts the power of discernment with much vigour when selflove favors the deceit.

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.

To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

He that never thinks can never be wise.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.

The finest landscape in the world is improved by a good inn in the foreground.

All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted.

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.

Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.

The triumph of hope over experience.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.

What signifies protesting so against flattery when a person speaks well of one, it must either be true or false, you know if true, let us rejoice in his good opinion if he lies, it is a proof at least that he loves more to please me, than to sit s

Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk; when they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.

Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred; they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.

There are three distinct kind of judges upon all new authors or productions; the first are those who know no rules, but pronounce entirely from their natural taste and feelings; the second are those who know and judge by rules; and the third are those who know, but are above the rules. These last are those you should wish to satisfy. Next to them rate the natural judges; but ever despise those opinions that are formed by the rules.