Quotes By Samuel Johnson

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

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.

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

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and... the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

The future is purchased by the present.

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 usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Love is only one of many passions.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

My dear friend, clear your mind of can't.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.