Samuel Johnson

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

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

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

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

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.