Samuel Johnson

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

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

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

I think we foreshorten our own viewpoint if we consider any state of mind, or society, or government as final. Growth and change! We can’t get away from them.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

It were better to be of no church, than to be bitter for any.

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

In the word of no master am I bound to believe.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.