Samuel Johnson

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while… you don’t do things right once in a while… you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Friendship is the next Pleasure we may hope for: And where we find it not at home, or have no home to find it in, we may seek it abroad. It is an Union of Spirits, a Marriage of Hearts, and the Bond thereof Vertue.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!

Where God does not govern, tyrants will rule.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.