Samuel Johnson

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.