Samuel Johnson

Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.

Whatever you have spend less.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.