Samuel Johnson

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

Language is the dress of thought.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

To inherit property is not to be born – it is to be still-born, rather.

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.