Samuel Johnson

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

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

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

I think that age is irrelevant. We’re all pretty much spiritual beings – I consider myself to be about eighty-five. I feel like I’m ancient, like two thousand years old.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

The most dangerous people are those who have passion but lack wisdom.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.