Samuel Johnson Quotes

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Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

Samuel Johnson
In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.

Samuel Johnson
If an author be supposed to involve his thoughts in voluntary obscurity, and to obstruct, by unnecessary difficulties, a mind eager in the pursuit of truth; if he writes not to make others learned, but to boast the learning which he possesses himself, and wishes to be admired rather than understood, he counteracts the first end of writing, and justly suffers the utmost severity of censure, or the more afflicting severity of neglect.

Samuel Johnson
Discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.

Samuel Johnson
Every man, however hopeless his pretensions may appear, has some project by which he hopes to rise to reputation; some art by which he imagines that the attention of the world will be attracted; some quality, good or bad, which discriminates him from the common herd of mortals, and by which others may be persuaded to love, or compelled to fear him.

Samuel Johnson
He who attempts to do all will waste his life in doing little.

Samuel Johnson
There is a certain degree of temptation which will overcome any virtue. Now, in so far as you approach temptation to a man, you do him an injury; and, if he is overcome, you share his guilt.

Samuel Johnson
He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.

Samuel Johnson
The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and the dread of poverty.

Samuel Johnson
Much mischief is done in the world with very little interest or design.

Samuel Johnson
Thought is always troublesome to him who lives without his own approbation.

Samuel Johnson
Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt; that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls.

Samuel Johnson
No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.

Samuel Johnson
All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.

Samuel Johnson
Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgement of his own works. On that which has cost him much labour he sets a high value, because he is unwilling to think that he has been diligent in vain: what has been produced without toilsome efforts is considered with delight as a proof of vigorous faculties and fertile invention; and the last work, whatever it be, has necessarily most of the grace of novelty.

Samuel Johnson
Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Samuel Johnson
In such a government as ours no man is appointed to an office because he is the fittest for it--nor hardly in any other government--because there are so many connections and dependencies to be studied.

Samuel Johnson
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

Samuel Johnson
Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired.

Samuel Johnson
To proportion the eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions.

Samuel Johnson
Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

Samuel Johnson
I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession.

Samuel Johnson
Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy, on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste, on the other, by which on the same income another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.

Samuel Johnson
The labor of rising from the ground will be great,... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.

Samuel Johnson
To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near to laudable that they have been often praised and are always pardoned.

Samuel Johnson
To purchase Heaven has gold the power?
Can gold remove the mortal hour?
In life can love be bought with gold?
Are friendship's pleasures to be sold?
No--all that's worth a wish--a thought,
Fair virtue gives unbribed, unbought.
Cease then on trash thy hopes to bind,
Let nobler views engage thy mind.

Samuel Johnson
Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.

Samuel Johnson
The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.

Samuel Johnson
Irresolution and mutability are often the faults of men whose views are wide, and whose imagination is vigorous and excursive.

Samuel Johnson
We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.

Samuel Johnson