Quotes by Samuel Johnson
Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.
Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.
Truth, Sir, is a cow, which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endue it.
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.
The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.
Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
BOSWELL " ... Is not the fear of death natural to man?" JOHNSON. "So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thought of i...
Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others... This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.
The future is purchased by the present.
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.
Fate wings with every wish th' afflictive dart, Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,
In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and attention in complaints which, if properly applied, might remove the cause.
The world is not yet exhaused let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.
Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.
Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.
Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
