Samuel Johnson

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

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

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

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.