Samuel Johnson

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

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

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

You show your worth by what you seek! – Rumi

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

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.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man’s intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man’s self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.