Samuel Johnson

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

A vow is a snare for sin.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.