Samuel Johnson

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

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.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

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

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Round numbers are always false.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.