Quotes By Samuel Johnson

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

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.