Samuel Johnson

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

Live, let live, and help live

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

How can one be well…when one suffers morally?

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

My reputation grows with every failure.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.