Samuel Johnson

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

Such as take lodgings in a head that’s to be let unfurnished.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The world is its own magic.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.