Samuel Johnson

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

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.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

If we win, nobody will care. If we lose, there will be nobody to care.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody

Every old poem is sacred.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.