Samuel Johnson

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

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

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.

It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

No man was ever great by imitation.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.

Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The man who forgives is far stronger than the man who fights.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.