Samuel Johnson Quotes

The true art of memory, is the art of attention

Present opportunities are neglected and attainable good is slighted by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages.

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.

To improve the golden moment of opportunity and catch the good that is within our reach is the great art of life.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

O how vain and vile a passion is this fear! What base uncomely things it makes men do.

It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

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.

When speculation has done its worst two and two still make four.

Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love like being enlivened with champagne.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.