Samuel Johnson

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

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

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.