Famous Quotes from ...

Samuel Johnson

  • When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • 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. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw be... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Like an image in a dream the world is troubled by love, hatred, and other poisons. So long as the dream lasts, the image appears to be real; but on awaking it vanishes.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Men hate more steadily than they love; and if I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Love has no great influences upon the sum of life.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • If you call a dog Harvey, I shall love him.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligen... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Insanity is the power of fancy over reason.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • It is, indeed, not easy to tell how far we may be blinded by the love of ourselves, when we reflect how much a secondary passion can cloud our judgment, and how few faults a man, in the first raptures of love, can discover in the person or conduct of... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed;... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Nature has given women so much power that the law has wisely given them little... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects; and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • A patriot is he whose public conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • A friend may be often found and lost, but an old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation... Samuel Johnson {view}
  • What ills from beauty spring... Samuel Johnson {view}