Samuel Johnson

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

There are charms made only for distance admiration.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

Hurricanes are named after people, baby, and I hope you know that falling in love with me will be so much more treacherous than boarding up the windows and waiting for me to pass.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.