Samuel Johnson

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

Love is only one of many passions.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

If we are but sure the end is right, we are too apt to gallop over all bounds to compass it; not considering the lawful ends may be very unlawfully attained.

Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

A man is related to all nature.

The hottest love has the coldest end.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.