Samuel Johnson

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist the parachute.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

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

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.