Samuel Johnson - Human Quotes

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A desire for knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all he has to get knowledge.

Samuel Johnson
If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.

Samuel Johnson
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.

Samuel Johnson
Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.

Samuel Johnson
Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.

Samuel Johnson
The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.

Samuel Johnson
It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive.

Samuel Johnson
In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

Samuel Johnson
Fleet-street has a very animated appearance; but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing-Cross.

Samuel Johnson
There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.

Samuel Johnson
To convince any man against his will is hard, but to please him against his will is justly pronounced by Dryden to be above the reach of human abilities.

Samuel Johnson
That eminence of learning is not to be gained without labour, at least equal to that which any other kind of greatness can require, will be allowed by those who wish to elevate the character of a scholar; since they cannot but know that every human acquisition is valuable in proportion to the difficulty of its attainment.

Samuel Johnson
To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Samuel Johnson
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Samuel Johnson
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.

Samuel Johnson
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

Samuel Johnson
Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.

Samuel Johnson