Samuel Johnson

Suspicion is most often useless pain.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.

Virtue is too often merely local.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it….

Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.