Samuel Johnson

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

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

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one – to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.