Samuel Johnson

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite human beings, Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.

Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.

Nothing is more common than mutual dislike, where mutual approbation is particularly expected.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

People ignore the thing they have the most power over. I know so many people who will go to a protest and do something big on an issue. But they won’t deal with that issue in their home.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.