Quotes By Samuel Johnson
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
Samuel Johnson
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
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Samuel Johnson
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
Samuel Johnson
You can't be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who's for you and who's against you.
Samuel Johnson
A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
Samuel Johnson
There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.
Samuel Johnson
Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
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
Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.
Samuel Johnson
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.
Samuel Johnson
Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.
Samuel Johnson
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
Samuel Johnson
Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.
Samuel Johnson
We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
Samuel Johnson
Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson