Samuel Johnson

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

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.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

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

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. They prefer suffering that is familiar to the unknown.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man’s knowledge, because I have so much of it.