Samuel Johnson

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.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

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

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.

Silence is not always tact, but it is tact that is golden, not silence.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

The future is purchased by the present.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

When many demons are struggling inside you, the one that you feed is the one that will become the strongest. You alone are responsible for what you feed.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.