Samuel Johnson

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors; nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

When you know better you do better.

This is the comfort of the godly: the grave cannot hold them, and they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.