Samuel Johnson Quotes

which has the power or quality of adding. The additory fiction gives to a great man a larger share of reputation than belongs to him, to enable him to serve some good end or purpose.Arbuthnot’sArt of political Lying.

Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!

I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

A thousand horrid Prodigies foretold it.
A feeble government, eluded Laws,
A factious Populace, luxurious Nobles,
And all the maladies of stinking states.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own dispositions will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.

You see they'd have fitted him to a T.

"That the dead are seen no more," said Imlac, "I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth: those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears. "Yet I do not mean to add new terrors to those which have already seized upon Pekuah. There can be no reason why spectres should haunt the Pyramid more than other places, or why they should have power or will to hurt innocence and purity. Our entrance is no violation of their privileges: we can take nothing from them; how, then, can we offend them?"

All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

Is there such depravity in man as that he should injure another without benefit to himself?