Samuel Johnson

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

When you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you. You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.

If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.

Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

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.

Revolutions are always verbose.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.