Samuel Johnson

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

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 a book.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

If you are going through hell, keep going.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.