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.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Round numbers are always false.

Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

A great man is always willing to be little.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… Beware of me, it says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.