Samuel Johnson

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

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

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

When a man is just and firm in his purpose, the citizens burning to approve a wrong or the frowning looks of a tyrant. Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind. Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic, nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove: Should the heavens crack and tumble down, as the ruins crushed him he would not fear.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

Remember who you are.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Prejudice not being funded on reason cannot be removed by argument.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.