Samuel Johnson

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

A vow is a snare for sin.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

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

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

Anger makes dull men witty – but it keeps them poor.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.