Samuel Johnson

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

He who praises every body, praises nobody.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

Courage is exhilarating.

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

Not to be provok’d is best: But if mov’d, never correct till the Fume is spent; For every Stroke our Fury strikes, is sure to hit our selves at last.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

Strivers achieve what dreamers believe.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.