Samuel Johnson

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

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

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.

Today is a king in disguise.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time, you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

The less government we have the better.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

You can tell a lot about a person by listening to the way they talk about someone they once loved.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.