Samuel Johnson Quotes
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The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.
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Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
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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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Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
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Hell is paved with good intentions.
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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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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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We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
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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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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
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Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
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Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.
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From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
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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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Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted; let me serve Thee with active zeal, humbled confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge.
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Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
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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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I am glad that he thanks God for anything.
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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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All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
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And sure th' Eternal Master foundHis single talent well employ'd.
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But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in few words.
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The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
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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.