Samuel Johnson

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

Travel is a fools paradise.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.