Samuel Johnson

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

Friendship, ‘the wine of life,’ said Boswell, should, like a well-stocked cellar, be thus continually renewed. And Dr. Johnson added to this A man, Sir, should keep his friendships in constant repair.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Kings are not born they are made by universal hallucination.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

For Wealth are all things that conduce, to one’s destruction or their use. A standard both to buy and sell, all things from heaven down to hell.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.