Samuel Johnson

No one ever became great by imitation.

What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn’t deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good – and less trouble!

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

I wish for you the wisdom to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with an apology.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

I am stronger than my fear.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.