Samuel Johnson

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Suspicion is most often useless pain.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you don’t need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

The only wealth is life.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.