Samuel Johnson Quotations | Page 15

Greece appears to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance

The size of a man's understanding can be justly measured by his mirth.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

All theory is against free will; all experience is for it.

He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others.

I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject.

I do not wonder that, where the monastick life is permitted, every order finds votaries, and every monastery inhabitants. Men will submit to any rule, by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance. They are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves.

It seems to be remarkable that death increases our veneration for the good, and extenuates our hatred for the bad.

Philosophy has often attempted to repress insolence by asserting that all conditions are leveled by death; a position which, however it may defect the happy, will seldom afford much comfort to the wretched.

The time will come to every human being when it must be known how well he can bear to die.

The uncertainty of death is, in effect, the great support of the whole system of life.

To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.

Persius has justly observed, that knowledge is nothing to him who is not known by others to possess it: to the scholar himself it is nothing with respect either to honour or advantage, for the world cannot reward those qualities which are concealed from it; with respect to others it is nothing, because it affords no help to ignorance or errour.

All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not. In the same manner, all power, of whatever sort, is of itself desirable. A man would not submit to learn to hem a ruffle, of his wife, or his wife's maid; but if a mere wish could attain it, he would rather wish to be able to hem a ruffle.

That the happiness of man may still remain imperfect, as wants in this place are easily supplied, new wants likewise are easily created; every man, in surveying the shops of London, sees numberless instruments and conveniencies, of which, while he did not know them, he never felt the need; and yet, when use has made them familiar, wonders how life could be supported without them. Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.

To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone, would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and flowers, had but ill suited with the capacity of Newton.

Wretched un-idea'd girls.

When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer their inferior while he is with them, it must be highly gratifying to them.

Order is a lovely nymph, the child of Beauty and Wisdom; her attendants are Comfort, Neatness, and Activity; her abode is the valley of happiness: she is always to be found when sought for, and never appears so lovely as when contrasted with her opponent, Disorder.

It is better a man should be abused than forgotten.

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end

Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves

Admiration begins where acquaintance ceases

In the description of night in Macbeth, the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness - inspissated gloom.

Nobody has the right to put another under such a difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth or hurt himself by telling what is not true.

Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats, And ask no questions but the price of votes.

It is easy for a man who sits idle at home, and has nobody to please but himself, to ridicule or censure the common practices of mankind.

It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood.

To me - the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity.

He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.

Every man may be observed to have a certain strain of lamentation, some peculiar theme of complaint on which he dwells in his moments of dejection.

It is thus that mutual cowardice keeps us in peace. Were one half of mankind brave and one cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave, they would lead a very uneasy life; all would be continually fighting; but being all cowards, we go on very well.

Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue; and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.

The difference between coarse and refined abuse is the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow.

We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor

Don't tell me of deception; a lie is a lie, whether it be a lie to the eye or a lie to the ear.

Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven, The noble mind's delight and pride, To men and angels only given, To all the lower world denied.

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.

Diligence in employments of less consequence is the most successful introduction to greater enterprises.

The imitator treads a beaten walk, and with all his diligence can only find a few flowers or branches untouched by his predecessor, the refuse of contempt, or the omissions of negligence.

When desperate ills demand a speedy cure, Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly.

A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.

A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity.

All envy is proportionate to desire.

I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession.

Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.

The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest; The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man.

Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying.

Like an image in a dream the world is troubled by love, hatred, and other poisons. So long as the dream lasts, the image appears to be real; but on awaking it vanishes.

The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed.

A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.

Gloomy calm of idle vacancy.

Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated; and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.

Jesting, often, only proves a want of intellect.

Of all the griefs that harass the distress'd, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest; Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.

Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science.

London! the needy villain's general home, The common sewer of Paris and of Rome! With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.

Luxury, so far as it reaches the people, will do good to the race of people; it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury; for, as I said before; it can reach but a very few.

A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.

I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the lord chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.

It is one of the maxims of the civil law, that definitions are hazardous.

As the faculty of writing has chiefly been a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon the women.

Get together a hundred or two men, however sensible they may be, and you are very likely to have a mob.

These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.

Occupation alone is happiness.

Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages.

Pleasure itself is not a vice

A man guilty of poverty easily believes himself suspected.

None can be pleased without praise, and few can be praised without falsehood.

The first years of man must make provision for the last.

What is twice read is commonly better remembered that what is transcribed.

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

He that never labors may know the pains of idleness, but not the pleasures.

To be of no Church is dangerous.

As every one is pleased with imagining that he knows something not yet commonly divulged, secret history easily gains credit; but it is for the most part believed only while it circulates in whispers, and when once it is openly told, is openly refuted.

To tell your own secrets is generally folly, but that folly is without guilt; to communicate those with which we are intrusted is always treachery, and treachery for the most part combined with folly.

The rules that I shall propose concerning secrecy, and from which I think it not safe to deviate without long and exact deliberation, are, never to solicit the knowledge of a secret,--not willingly, nor without many limitations, to accept such confidence when it is offered; when a secret is once admitted, to consider the trust as of a very high nature, important as society and sacred as truth, and therefore not to be violated for any incidental convenience, or slight appearance of contrary fitness.

Everybody knows worse of himself than he knows of other men.

The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.

Want of tenderness is want of parts, and is no less a proof of stupidity than depravity.

Conjecture as to things useful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle.

Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life.

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

I remember a passage in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: "I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.

In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.

The arguments for purity of life fail of their due influence, not because they have been considered and confuted, but because they have been passed over without consideration.

There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving Ignorance and Envy the first notice of a prey.

Life admits not of delays; when pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it. Every hour takes away part of the things that please us, and perhaps part of our disposition to be pleased.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.

The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.

But it is evident, that these bursts of universal distress are more dreaded than felt; thousands and ten thousands flourish in youth, and wither in age, without the knowledge of any other than domestic evils, and share the same pleasures and vexa­tions, whether their kings are mild or cruel, whether the armies of their country pursue their enemies or retreat before them.

New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.