Samuel Johnson

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.

Whatever you have spend less.

I believe in the limitlessness of humans. We’re capable of incredible things. At times that realization is frightening.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.