Samuel Johnson

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Real love begins when nothing is expected in return.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.

There is only one good – knowledge; and only one evil – ignorance.

All those moments are alive in us today. We may not visit them anymore, very often, but we carry them in our DNA, our blood, our bones; informing the breadth and beauty of who we now are; our lesson to be lived.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.