Samuel Johnson

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

There are charms made only for distance admiration.

Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

I always forgive others. The anger; sadness; frustration; pain, whatever feelings I felt, no matter the hurt; the tears, I always found understanding and reason to forgive them; to not hold onto it; to not resent them. But there is one, who I never seem to be able to give absolution, and that’s myself.

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.