Samuel Johnson

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are evil.