Samuel Johnson

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

You can tell a lot about a person by listening to the way they talk about someone they once loved.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.