Samuel Johnson

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

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

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

Where God does not govern, tyrants will rule.

If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

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

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.