Samuel Johnson

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play.

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

I desire to gain your Love and Friendship by a kind, Just and Peaceful Life.

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

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.