Samuel Johnson Quotes
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There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
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Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
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If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?
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Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.
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The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.
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To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.
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Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
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One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
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Language is the dress of thought.
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Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.
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I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.
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Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise!From Marlb'rough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,And Swift expires, a driv'ler and a show.
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Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.
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By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.
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He that would pass the latter part of life with honour and decency, must, when he is young, consider that he shall one day be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young.
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I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
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So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.
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Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
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It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.
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Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
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Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.
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Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.
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Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.