Samuel Johnson

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

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

Love is only one of many passions.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

I look up at the universe and ask, ‘What are you trying to teach me here?’ I know I won’t hear a reply, but asking the question, makes me begin looking for the answer.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.