Samuel Johnson's Quotes

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

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.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.

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

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

To love one that is great, is almost to be great one's self.

Love is only one of many passions.

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

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

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

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

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

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

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

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

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.

My dear friend, clear your mind of can't.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

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

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

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.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

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

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.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

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

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

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.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

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

Exercise is labor without weariness.

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

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

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

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

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

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

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

The future is purchased by the present.

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

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

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

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

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

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

You can't be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who's for you and who's against you.

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.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.