Samuel Johnson

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

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

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

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.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

She was taken by surprise at quite how breathtaking the twinkle in her eyes was. She listened and watched attentively, magnetized. As butterflies danced on her lips, her own stomach felt butterflies.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.