Samuel Johnson

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.

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

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Suspicion is most often useless pain.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.