Samuel Johnson

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.