Samuel Johnson

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

No man was ever great by imitation.

As the Spanish proverb says, He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Blame is safer than praise.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

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

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.