Samuel Johnson

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.

We are inclined to believe those whom we don not know because they have never deceived us.

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring.

Love is only one of many passions.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.