Samuel Johnson

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.

Drunkenness spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans man. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say. If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.