Samuel Johnson

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

It is necessary to hope… for hope itself is happiness.

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

When you know better, you do better.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

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

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.