Samuel Johnson Quotes
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The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
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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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With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind,And makes the happiness she does not find.
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Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
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The limbs will quiver and move after the soul is gone.
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I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night; and then the nap takes me.
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I am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.
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Blown about with every wind of criticism.
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A frame of adamant, a soul of fire,No dangers fright him, and no labors tire.
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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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Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
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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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Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
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What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
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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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Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
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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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All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
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He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
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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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The future is purchased by the present.
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Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.
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I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.