Samuel Johnson

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

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

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

Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

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.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

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

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.