Samuel Johnson

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Beauty rests on necessities.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

We have more than we use.

The reward of one’s duty is the power to fulfill another.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.