Samuel Johnson Quotes

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.

Much is due to those who first broke the way to knowledge, and left only to their successors the task of smoothing it.

A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.

Time quickly puts an end to artificial and accidental fame

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity; a combination of a passion which all endeavor to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest.

Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil.

Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding.

In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.

The great source of pleasure is variety.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth; especially in an aged bosom

Where there is no difficulty there is no praise.

The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.

An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.

Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

Contempt is a kind of gangrene which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.

I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence.

We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.

Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.

From ignorance our comfort flows, the only wretched are the wise

Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.

It is surely very narrow policy that supposes money to be the chief good.

I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.

You despise a man for avarice; but you do not hate him.

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.

Employment and hardships prevent melancholy.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

Apologies are seldom of any use.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

Pity is not natural to man. Children always are cruel. Savages are always cruel.

The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting debts in his passion, which his virtue obliges him to pay. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation.

The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

A vow is a snare for sin