Samuel Johnson

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

Seek not to be Rich, but Happy. The one lies in Bags, the other in Content: which Wealth can never give.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.