Samuel Johnson

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

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.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.