Samuel Johnson

Security will produce danger.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable – any real insight or broad human sentiment.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.