Samuel Johnson

What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

Fierce eagles do not produce timorous doves.

To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.

Never be bored, and you will never be boring.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

The more experiments you make the better.

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.