Samuel Johnson Quotes
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
Knowledge always desires increase, it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.
To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence.
No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.
Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.
Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.
Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
The charm of London is that you are never glad or sorry for ten minutes together; in the country you are one or the other for weeks.
To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.
He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
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.
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.
He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
Those that have done nothing in life, are not qualified to judge of those that have done little
To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.
Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Let us walk down Cheapside.
Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
When a man marries a widow his jealousies revert to the past: no man is as good as his wife says her first husband was
You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.
Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.
A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know That life protracted is protracted woe.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.