Samuel Johnson

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

Count on it, if a person talks of their misfortune, there is something in it that is not disagreeable to them.

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

The mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.

Watch what you say, and whatever you say, practice it.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

Without passion, you don’t have energy. Without energy, you have nothing.

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

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.