Quotes By Samuel Johnson

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.