Samuel Johnson

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

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.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life…all of our life.

All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.