Samuel Johnson

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Already know you that which you need.

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.

The advantage of doing one’s praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.

A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.

Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Letting go is not giving up.

Genius Borrows nobly.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…