Samuel Johnson

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.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rule of composition; it produces vigilance rather than elevation; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who think diffenrently…

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Nature hates calculators.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.