Samuel Johnson

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

How hard you work matters more than how much you make.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

There is properly no history; only biography.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?