Samuel Johnson

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

Patience – the gift of being able to see past the emotion.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.