Samuel Johnson

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?.

If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God; and to do that, thou must be ruled by him who has given to kings his grace to command themselves and their subjects, and to the people the grace to obey God and their kings.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

The city is recruited from the country.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.