Samuel Johnson

Those who attain to any excellence commonly spend life in some single pursuit, for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.

The future is purchased by the present.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

Sexes make no Difference; since in Souls there is none: And they are the Subjects of Friendship.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.