Samuel Johnson

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs. A Judge may play a little at cards for his own amusement; but he is not to play at marbles, or chuck farthing in the Piazza.

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.