Samuel Johnson

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

Whatever you have spend less.

He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.