Samuel Johnson

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Love is only one of many passions.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

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

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

I am stronger than my fear.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.