Samuel Johnson Quotes
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I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
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It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.
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Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
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Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanicks laughs at strength.
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EXCISE - A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
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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.
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That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.
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I Boswell happened to say, it would be terrible if he should not find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in so dull a place. JOHNSON: 'Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here.'
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A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
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Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.
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For patience, sov'reign o'er transmuted ill.
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GRUBSTREET - The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.
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Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
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You see they'd have fitted him to a T.
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It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.
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From Thee, great God: we spring, to Thee we tend,Path, motive, guide, original, and end.
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Superfluous lags the vet'ran on the stage.
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Of all the Griefs that harrass the Distrest,Sure the most bitter is a scornful Jest
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Pleasure of itself is not a vice.
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Sir, you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
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A man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.
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Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.
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Then with no throbs of fiery pain,No cold gradations of decay,Death broke at once the vital chain,And freed his soul the nearest way.
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To a poet nothing can be useless.