Samuel Johnson

Turn on the prudent ant thy heedful eyes. Observe her labors, sluggard, and be wise.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

Whatever you have spend less.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

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

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.