Samuel Johnson

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

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

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life… I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life… to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.