Samuel Johnson

The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.

In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and attention in complaints which, if properly applied, might remove the cause.

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

The one who prosperity takes too much delight in will be the most shocked by reverses.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

Gold will be slave or master.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.