Samuel Johnson

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.