Samuel Johnson Quotes

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.

Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Men are wise in proportion not to their experience but to their capacity for experience.

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary be not idle.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

An intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.

Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

Your aspirations are your possibilities.

Old age is not a disease- it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Language is the dress of thought.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

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

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

No mind is much employed upon the present recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

Do not ... hope wholly to reason away your troubles do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Self confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

Our aspirations are our possibilities.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

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.

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.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.

Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self- interest.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

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.

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

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.