Samuel Johnson

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

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

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o clock is a scoundrel.

Well, when it comes to social media – there are just times I turn off the world, you know. There are just some times you have to give yourself space to be quiet, which means you’ve got to set those phones down. You can’t be reading all that stuff. I mean, that’s like letting somebody just walk up and slap you, you know? You would never do that. You would never just sit there and go, slap me in the face and I’m good with it. No. So why would you open yourself up to that?

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.