Samuel Johnson

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rule of composition; it produces vigilance rather than elevation; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor.

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Kings in this should imitate God, their mercy should be above their works.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but torment to themselves.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

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