Samuel Johnson

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

The third component of the Law of Dharma is service to humanity–to serve your fellow human beings and to ask yourself the questions,How can I help? How can I help all those that I come into contact with? When you combine the ability to express your unique talent with service to humanity, then you make full use of the Law of Dharma.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.