Samuel Johnson

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Love is only one of many passions.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

Branching streams cannot compare to the source.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.