Samuel Johnson

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

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

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Nature has always had more force than education.