Samuel Johnson Quotes

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation.

We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude. But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.

Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine, why should you number up my cups of tea?

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

"Happiness," said he, "must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty."

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler

A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.