Samuel Johnson

What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn’t deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

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

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

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

When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

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

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

It were Happy if we studied Nature more in natural Things; and acted according to Nature; whose rules are few, plain and most reasonable.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

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