Samuel Johnson Quotes

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

The true art of memory, is the art of attention

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.

Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving.

Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

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

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

I look upon it that a man who does not mind his stomach would hardly mind anything else.

He that would pass the latter part of life with honour and decency, must, when he is young, consider that he shall one day be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young.

Such, said Nekayah, is the state of life, none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish it to change again. The world is not yet exhausted. Let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night; and then the nap takes me.

It ought to be deeply impressed on the minds of all who have voices in this national deliberation, that no man can deserve a seat in parliament, who is not a patriot. No other man will protect our rights: no other man can merit our confidence. A patriot is he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest.

A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn.