Samuel Johnson

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

The traveler that resolutely follows a rough and winding path will sooner reach the end of his journey than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hour of daylight in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Seek not to be Rich, but Happy. The one lies in Bags, the other in Content: which Wealth can never give.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

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

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.