Samuel Johnson

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

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

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Letting go is not giving up.

Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

In the word of no master am I bound to believe.