Famous Quotes

Quotes by Samuel Johnson

• 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.
• There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
• To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
• To keep your secret is wisdom but to expect others to keep it is folly.
• To keep your secret is wisdom to expect others to keep it is folly.
• To love one that is great, is almost to be great one's self.
• Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.