Samuel Johnson

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite human beings, Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

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.

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Knowledge is power.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.