Samuel Johnson
168 quotations
Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity.
No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.
He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.
There are charms made only for distance admiration.
Suspicion is most often useless pain.
We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.
The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.
When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.
In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.
Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.
Virtue is too often merely local.
Wickedness is always easier than virtue, for it takes a short cut to everything.
A vow is a snare for sin.
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.