Samuel Johnson

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

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.

It is your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

Every other enjoyment malice may destroy; every other panegyric envy may withhold; but no human power can deprive the boaster of his own encomiums.

Women tell men things that they are not likely to find out for themselves.

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

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.

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

The future is purchased by the present.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.