Samuel Johnson

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

There are charms made only for distance admiration.

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.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

We judge of man’s wisdom by his hope.

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.

Do not assume anything. Clear your mind must be if you are to discover the real villains behind this plot.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.