Samuel Johnson Quotes

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Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

Samuel Johnson
The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Samuel Johnson
Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

Samuel Johnson
Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry.

Samuel Johnson
These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

Samuel Johnson
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

Samuel Johnson
Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

Samuel Johnson
A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.

Samuel Johnson
To tell of disappointment and misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of the poets

Samuel Johnson
That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm, quiet interchange of sentiments....

Samuel Johnson
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Samuel Johnson
This mournful truth is ev'rywhere confessed —
Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.

Samuel Johnson
Johnson observed, that "he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney."

Samuel Johnson
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.

Samuel Johnson
Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger at his death.

Samuel Johnson
That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Samuel Johnson
We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.

Samuel Johnson
They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty.

Samuel Johnson
That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

Samuel Johnson
Sir, they are a race of convicts and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Samuel Johnson
To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.

Samuel Johnson
An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.
Of Italian Opera

Samuel Johnson
Lampoon. A personal satire; abuse; censure written not to reform but to vex.

Samuel Johnson
Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world.

Samuel Johnson
He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.

Samuel Johnson
I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions and sentiments I find delight.
On his conversation in taverns

Samuel Johnson
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

Samuel Johnson
A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

Samuel Johnson
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Samuel Johnson
In the description of night in Macbeth, the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness,—inspissated gloom.

Samuel Johnson