Samuel Johnson

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

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

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

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

Live, let live, and help live

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

I do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

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.