Samuel Johnson

He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

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.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

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

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life’.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

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.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.