Samuel Johnson

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.

I thus free myself from the illness of ego-clinging.

Today, you can decide to walk in freedom. You can choose to walk differently. You can walk as a free person, enjoying every step.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.