Samuel Johnson

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Punishment closely follows guilt as its companion.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.