Samuel Johnson

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.

They say that history repeats itself, so if you don’t learn from the past you will make the same mistakes. So I have become an archaeologist of my own history. Digging up what has long since been buried, exhuming those forgotten fragments. Trying to distinguish what is real from folklore, trying to gain understanding, rather than relying on myths.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.