Samuel Johnson

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

For who is pleased with himself.

The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Choose people who lift you up.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

I think we foreshorten our own viewpoint if we consider any state of mind, or society, or government as final. Growth and change! We can’t get away from them.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.