Samuel Johnson

Virtue is too often merely local.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

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.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

I’ve learned that from my husband, that sort of, you know, ability to not get too high or too low with changes and bumps in the road.

Although the road is never ending, take a step and keep walking, do not look fearfully into the distance…on the path let the heart be your guide for the body is hesitant and full of fear.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

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