Samuel Johnson

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

It is necessary to hope… for hope itself is happiness.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

Be better. Be better at everything. Be better fathers… Men can be better husbands, which is – be a part of your family’s life. Do the dishes. Don’t babysit your children. You don’t babysit your own children. Be engaged. Don’t just think going to work and coming home makes you a man. Being a father, being engaged, all that stuff is important. Be a better employer. When you are sitting at a seat of power at a table of any kind and you look around you just see you, it’s just you and a bunch of men around a table, on a golf course, making deals, and you allow that to happen, and you’re okay with that – be better.

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

As Puppets are to Men, and Babies to Children, so is Man’s Workmanship to God’s: We are the Picture, he the Reality.

The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.