Samuel Johnson

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

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.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

If you want the moon, do not hide from the night. If you want a rose, do not hide from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.