Samuel Johnson

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

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.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

The key to every man is his thought. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

Necessity does everything well.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.