Samuel Johnson

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.

Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.

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

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.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’- yours.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?