Samuel Johnson

What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

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.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits not because recompense is a pleasure for them, but because obligation is a pain.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderated use rather than total abstinence.