Samuel Johnson

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

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Whether he knew it or not, the life he lived was his penance. Punishing himself, for what he believes are his sins. Consciously or subconsciously, he creates the world he lives in. Never believing that he is deserving happiness, deserving joy. His self-destructive nature, in his eyes, and his eyes only, is justified. Everyone is deserving absolution, but he needs to understand, that he is the only one able to forgive himself.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

We all have our challenges, issues, things that we’re working through and insecurity is there because nobody is perfect no matter who you are. It’s that imperfection that makes you so dope.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?