Samuel Johnson Quotes

What is the reason that women servants ... have much lower wages than men servants ... when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?

Now ... that you are going to marry, do not expect more from life, than life will afford.

Surely, it is much easier to respect a man who has always had respect, than to respect a man who we know was last year no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year.

Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.

Domestic discord is not inevitably and fatally necessary; but yet it is not easy to avoid.

Inquiries into the heart are not for man.

A newswriter is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit.

In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

The joy of life is variety.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience.

Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant

Nobody can be taught faster than he can learn.

We often look with indifference on the successive parts of something that, if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion.

True enjoyments also keep people from vice.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour.

Quack: A boastful pretender to arts which he does not understand. A vain boastful pretender to physick; An artful, tricking practitioner in physick.

Ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure ... if it is not rising into pleasure will be falling towards pain.

Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

Friendship may well deserve the sacrifice of pleasure, though not of conscience.

If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

Merit rather enforces respect than attracts fondness.

The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.

The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.

There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation.

There is nothing so minute, or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.

Towering is the confidence of twenty-one.

Whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.

Most men are unwilling to be taught.

He who attempts to do all will waste his life in doing little.

Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about the world, and are assigned successively to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate.

To be prejudiced is always to be weak

A family ... is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.

The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death.

As long as one lives he will have need of repentance.

We often need reminding even if we do not often need educating.

As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness if often covered by turbulence and hurry.

It is to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness.

No man should attempt to teach others what he has never learned himself

People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them.

It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence.

He that pines with hunger, is in little care how others shall be fed. The poor man is seldom studious to make his grandson rich.

He who fails to please in his salutation and address is at once rejected, and never obtains an opportunity of showing his latest excellences or essential qualities.

No knowledge is useless, with the exception of heraldry.

Celestial wisdom calms the mind.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

As any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice.

Nothing concentrates one's mind so much as the realization that one is going to be hanged in the morning!