Samuel Johnson

Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

A picture is a poem without words.

In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and attention in complaints which, if properly applied, might remove the cause.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

All say, How hard it is that we have to die – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’- yours.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.