Samuel Johnson Easy Quotations

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

It is easy to talk of sitting at home contented, when others are seeing or making shows. But not to have been where it is supposed, and seldom supposed falsely, that all would go if they could; to be able to say nothing when everyone is talking; to have no opinion when everyone is judging; to hear exclamations of rapture without power to depress; to listen to falsehoods without right to contradict, is, after all, a state of temporary inferiority, in which the mind is rather hardened by stubbornness, than supported by fortitude. If the world be worth winning let us enjoy it, if it is to be despised let us despise it by conviction. But the world is not to be despised but as it is compared with something better.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

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.

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

Domestic discord is not inevitably and fatally necessary; but yet it is not easy to avoid.

I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.