Samuel Johnson

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

Count on it, if a person talks of their misfortune, there is something in it that is not disagreeable to them.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite human beings, Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

All those moments are alive in us today. We may not visit them anymore, very often, but we carry them in our DNA, our blood, our bones; informing the breadth and beauty of who we now are; our lesson to be lived.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.

What fugitive from his country can also escape from himself.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

I hate the irreverent rabble and keep them far from me.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Surrender is faith that the power of love can accomplish anything… even when you can not foresee the outcome.

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.