Samuel Johnson

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

It is not from reason and prudence that people marry, but from inclination.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

Suspicion is most often useless pain.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

No man was ever great by imitation.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.