Samuel Johnson

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

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.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

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.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Do or do not. There is no try.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

To every disadvantage there is a corresponding advantage.