Samuel Johnson

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves: and perhaps that is the reason of it.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

There is nothing to fear except fear it’s self.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.