Samuel Johnson

We are inclined to believe those whom we don not know because they have never deceived us.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.