Samuel Johnson Quotations | Page 6

It is unpleasing to represent our affairs to our own disadvantage; yet it is necessary to shew the evils which we desire to be removed.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness . . .

There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it.

A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

Curiosity is the thirst of the soul.

The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

Plenty is the original cause of many of our needs; and even the poverty, which is so frequent and distressful in civilized nations, proceeds often from that change of manners which opulence has produced. Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries; but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

Exercise is labor without weariness.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Love is only one of many passions.

No man was ever great by imitation.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.

Hope itself is 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.

When there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.

Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage.

Round numbers are always false.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.

In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion.

The habit of looking on the bright side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a year.

Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.

There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn't deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.

Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious. But for the same reason everyone is eager to instruct his neighbours. To be wise or to be virtuous is to buy dignity and importance at a high price; but when nothing is necessary to elevation but detection of the follies or faults of others, no man is so insensible to the voice of fame as to linger on the ground.

Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, by the advantage which licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.

Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness. he whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.

The really happy woman is the one who can enjoy the scenery when she has to take a detour. Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but rather a manner of traveling.

A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company

A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city.

Among other pleasing errors of young minds is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from themselves, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines everyone that approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy.

Club: An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.

Discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed ... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.

Ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure ... if it is not rising into pleasure will be falling towards pain.

Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

Friendship may well deserve the sacrifice of pleasure, though not of conscience.

I would injure no man, and should provoke no resentment. I would relieve every distress, and should enjoy the benedictions of gratitude. I would choose my friends among the wise and my wife among the virtuous, and therefore should be in no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should by my care be learned and pious, and would repay to my age what their childhood had received.

If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many temptations of petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. An authour cannot obtrude his advice unasked, nor can be often suspected of any malignant intention to insult his readers with his knowledge or his wit. Yet so prevalent is the habit of comparing ourselves with others, while they remain within the reach of our passions, that books are seldom read with complete impartiality, but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.

Studious to please, yet not ashamed to fail.

We are told, that the black bear is innocent; but I should not like to trust myself with him.

Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed; but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the association pleasing, and give probable hopes that they shall be disciplined by an easy separation...to die is the fate of man; but to die with lingering anguish is generally his folly.

The first step to greatness is to be honest.

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.

No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country. For instance, if he is to shut himself up for a year to study science, it is better to look out to the fields, than to an opposite wall. Then, if a man walks out in the country, there is nobody to keep him from walking in again: but if a man walks out in London, he is not sure when he will walk in again. A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life.

They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city, know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see the town.

Moderation is commonly firm, and firmness is commonly successful.

Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.

The process is the reality.

We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

The business of life is to go forward.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.

None but a fool worries about things he cannot influence.

To be free it is not enough to beat the system, one must beat the system every day

As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time; but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law; that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.

Sir, it is wrong to stir up law-suits; but when once it is certain that a law-suit is to go on, there is nothing wrong in a lawyer's endeavouring that he shall have the benefit, rather than another.

There ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.

To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seem to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

He left the name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which if not a virtue, is the groundwork of a virtue.

Every man, however hopeless his pretensions may appear, has some project by which he hopes to rise to reputation; some art by which he imagines that the attention of the world will be attracted; some quality, good or bad, which discriminates him from the common herd of mortals, and by which others may be persuaded to love, or compelled to fear him.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

To make dictionaries is dull work.

Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?

His most frequent ailment was the headache which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee.

I love the acquaintance of young people; because, in the first place, I do not like to think myself growing old. In the next place, young acquaintances must last longest, if they do last; and then, sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect.

The civilities of the great are never thrown away.

The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

It has long been observed, that an atheist has no just reason for endeavouring conversions; and yet none harass those minds which they can influence, with more importunity of solicitation to adopt their opinions. In proportion as they doubt the truth of their own doctrines, they are desirous to gain the attestation of another understanding: and industriously labour to win a proselyte, and eagerly catch at the slightest pretense to dignify their sect with a distinguished name.

It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful.

The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.

All this [wealth] excludes but one evil, poverty.

Fears of the brave and follies of the wise.