Samuel Johnson

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!

A shoe that is too large is apt to trip one, and when too small, to pinch the feet. So it is with those whose fortune does not suit them.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I don’t do quagmires.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.