Samuel Johnson Quotes
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.
O how vain and vile a passion is this fear! What base uncomely things it makes men do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Knowledge is of two kinds we know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it.
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life . . . the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.
Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected even when it is associated with vice.
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.
Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.
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 one book.
Man is not weak - knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanics laughs at strength.
No one is much pleased with a companion who does not increase, in some respect, their fondness for themselves.
