Samuel Johnson

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

My favorite nightcap, after all this time, is still the cocktail of you.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

Cultivate kindness today and always.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

The natural law of inertia: Matter will remain at rest or continue in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.