Samuel Johnson

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

No just cause is futile, even if it’s lost, if it helps make the future better than the past.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

He looks the whole world in the face for he owes not any man.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

A picture is a poem without words.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?