Samuel Johnson

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs. A Judge may play a little at cards for his own amusement; but he is not to play at marbles, or chuck farthing in the Piazza.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

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

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Resting at your shore fills me with a peace, as if I’ve always been here. My cells resonating with the element of you, boundaries diffuse as one.

Suspicion is most often useless pain.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.

If we don’t occupy ourself with everything, then peaceful mind will have nowhere to abide.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.