Samuel Johnson Quotes

The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.

Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

For 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. He that labours in any great or laudable undertaking, has his fatigues first supported by hope, and afterwards rewarded by joy... To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.

The whole power of cunning is privative; to say nothing, and to do nothing , is the utmost of its reach. Yet men, thus narrow by nature and mean by art, are sometimes able to rise by the miscarriages of bravery and the openness of integrity, and, watching failures and snatching opportunities, obtain advantages which belong to higher characters.

Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation.

He that teaches us anything which we knew not before is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master.

No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.

False taste is always busy to mislead those that are entering upon the regions of learning; and the traveller, uncertain of his way, and forsaken by the sun, will be pleased to see a fainter orb arise on the horizon, that may rescue him from total darkness, though with weak and borrowed lustre.

The coquette has companions, indeed, but no lovers,--for love is respectful and timorous; and where among her followers will she find a husband?

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

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

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; ad if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

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.

Our aspirations are our possibilities.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

All imposture weakens confidence and chills benevolence.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard; to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.

You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful income.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

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.

The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge, or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed everything generally supposed to confer happiness have been forced to seek it in the shades of privacy.

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

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.

The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence.

All industry must be excited by hope.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

What is said upon a subject is gathered from an hundred people.

It is necessary to the success of flattery, that it be accommodated to particular circumstances or characters, and enter the heart on that side where the passions are ready to receive it.

He who endeavors to please must appear pleased.

He that would travel for the entertainment of others should remember that the great object of remark is human life.

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

The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.