Quotes By Samuel Johnson

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

Language is the dress of thought.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

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

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

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 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.