Samuel Johnson

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

Language is the dress of thought.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man’s intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man’s self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.

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

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

We are free to yield to truth.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

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