Samuel Johnson Quotes

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.

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 superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

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

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.

The charm of London is that you are never glad or sorry for ten minutes together; in the country you are one or the other for weeks.

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

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.

In all pleasures hope is a considerable part.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

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

Mutual complacency is the atmosphere of conjugal love.

Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

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

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

The vicious count their years; virtuous, their acts.

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.

To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.

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

He that is much flattered soon learns to flatter himself.

Knowledge always desires increase, it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.

He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.

Suspicion is most often useless pain.

Officious, innocent, sincere, Of every friendless name the friend.

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.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

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.

To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.

As the greatest liar tells more truths than falsehoods, so may it be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.

There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

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.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay.

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

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; Who, born for the Universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

There are two types of knowledge. One is knowing a thing. The other is knowing where to find it.

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.