Samuel Johnson

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

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

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

Nature hates calculators.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.