Famous Quotes

Quotes by Samuel Johnson

• Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
• Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.
• Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
• Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.
• Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
• Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.
• Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
• Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and... the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.
• Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
• No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
• No man was ever great by imitation.
• No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.
• No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
• Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
• Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
• Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
• Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
• Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
• Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.
• 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.
• Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
• Small debts are like small shot they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon of loud noise, but little danger.
• Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
• Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.
• The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love, like being enlivened with champagne.
• The future is purchased by the present.
• The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
• The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
• The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
• The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
• The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
• The true art of memory is the art of attention.
• The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
• The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
• The world is seldom what it seems to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.
• There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.
• There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
• 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.
• There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
• There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.