Samuel Johnson

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

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

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Once you truly understand that it is okay to lose or fail, you are free, you have nothing to fear, and only then, can nothing in this world hold you back.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

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