Samuel Johnson

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

As the Spanish proverb says, He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Whatever you have spend less.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Appearances matter – and remember to smile.

Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Have good trust in yourself … not in the One that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

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

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others

A private Life is to be preferred; the Honor and Gain of publick Posts, bearing no proportion with the Comfort of it