Quotes By Samuel Johnson

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.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

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.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.