Samuel Johnson

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

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

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

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

For we put the power in the people.

There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Remember who you are.

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

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven’t as yet arrived.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.