Samuel Johnson

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

In the word of no master am I bound to believe.

A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.