Samuel Johnson Quotes

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Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.

Samuel Johnson
Patron. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

Samuel Johnson
How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives

Samuel Johnson
A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

Samuel Johnson
It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.

Samuel Johnson
A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

Samuel Johnson
Elphinston: What, have you not read it through?
Johnson: No, Sir, do you read books through?

Samuel Johnson
Of all the griefs that harrass the distressed,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest;
Fate never wounds more deep the gen'rous heart,
Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.

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

Samuel Johnson
Few things are so liberally bestowed, or squandered with so little effect, as good advice.

Samuel Johnson
If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

Samuel Johnson
Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from time to come.

Samuel Johnson
Nothing … will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.

Samuel Johnson
Resentment gratifies him who intended an injury, and pains him unjustly who did not intend it.

Samuel Johnson
There is such a difference between the pursuits of men in great cities that one part of the inhabitants lives to little other purpose than to wonder at the rest. Some have hopes and fears, wishes and aversions, which never enter into the thoughts of others, and inquiry is laboriously exerted to gain that which those who possess it are ready to throw away.

Samuel Johnson
If the guardian or the mother
Tell the woes of willful waste,
Scorn their counsel and their pother,
You can hang or drown at last.

Samuel Johnson
I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

Samuel Johnson
Kindness, at least actual, is in our power, but fondness is not.

Samuel Johnson
This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.

Samuel Johnson
I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.

Samuel Johnson
Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.... Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world.

Samuel Johnson
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Samuel Johnson
The time will come to every human being when it must be known how well he can bear to die.

Samuel Johnson
Many a man is mad in certain instances, and goes through life without having it perceived. For example, a madness has seized a person of supposing himself obliged literally to pray continually; had the madness turned the opposite way, and the person thought it a crime ever to pray, it might not improbably have continued unobserved.

Samuel Johnson
No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.

Samuel Johnson