Samuel Johnson

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

For who is pleased with himself.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

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.

He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.