Samuel Johnson

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

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.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

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

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

Round numbers are always false.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

You. Not wanting me. Was the beginning of me wanting myself. Thank you.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

There are charms made only for distance admiration.

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which ‘The Recognitions’ ’ debt to ‘Ulysses’ was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read ‘Ulysses.

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.

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand — relax!

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.