Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)
British author, linguist and lexicographer.
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
As the Spanish proverb says, "He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
Here closed in death th' attentive eyes
That saw the manners in the face.
It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.
Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.
The greater, far the greater number of those who rave and rail, and inquire and accuse, neither suspect nor fear, nor care for the publick; but hope to force their way to riches, by virulence and invective, and are vehement and clamorous, only that they may be sooner hired to be silent.
Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Sir, you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.
I called on Dr. Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. "There were several gentlemen there," said she, "and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking." She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals -- "I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves." "I wonder, Madam," replied the Doctor, "that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.
For patience, sov'reign o'er transmuted ill.
A frame of adamant, a soul of fire,
No dangers fright him, and no labors tire.
Hell is paved with good intentions.