Samuel Johnson Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Unmoved though Witlings sneer and Rivals rail, Studious to please, yet not ashamed to fail. He scorns the meek address, the suppliant strain. With merit needless, and without it vain. In Reason, Nature, Truth, he dares to trust: Ye Fops, be silent: and ye Wits, be just.
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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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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.
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Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!
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I am glad that he thanks God for anything.
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A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.
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All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.
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And sure th' Eternal Master foundHis single talent well employ'd.
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I am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.
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He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
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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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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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We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
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The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honourable gentleman has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience.
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It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.
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A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
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Blown about with every wind of criticism.
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Hell is paved with good intentions.
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Wine gives a man nothing... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
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The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.