Samuel Johnson

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

Have wholesome, but not costly Food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

My favorite nightcap, after all this time, is still the cocktail of you.

It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.

The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.