Samuel Johnson

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits not because recompense is a pleasure for them, but because obligation is a pain.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.

It always seems impossible until its done.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most… Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

The hottest love has the coldest end.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.