Samuel Johnson

To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

Think with your whole body.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

The virtue in most request is conformity.