Samuel Johnson

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

There is a wisdom of the head, and there is a wisdom of the heart.

It is proved…that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they’re gone.

A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.