Quotes by Samuel Johnson
So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.
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.
Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
What is easy is seldom excellent.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
Love is only one of many passions.
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
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.
Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
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.
We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
