Samuel Johnson

Marriage is the best state for man in general, and every man is a worst man in proportion to the level he is unfit for marriage.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

None of us should be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.