Quotes By Samuel Johnson

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

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

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

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

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.