Samuel Johnson

I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

Those who attain to any excellence commonly spend life in some single pursuit, for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

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

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Wit and Humor – if any difference, it is in duration – lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage – the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

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.

Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.