Samuel Johnson Quotes

Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken, themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

Of the proportion, which the product of any region bears to the people, an estimate is commonly made according to the pecuniary price of the necessities of life; which is never certain, because it supposes what is far from truth, that the value of money is always the same, and so measures an unknown quantity by an uncertain standard. It is competent enough when the markets of the same country, at different times, and those times not too distant, are to be compared; but of very little use for the purpose of making one nation acquainted with the state of another.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sire, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn't 'em both.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

When a king asked Euclid, the mathematician, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner? he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry.

All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.

The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something to-morrow which I never saw before.

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

Κανένα μέρος δεν προβάλλει τόσο έντονα τη ματαιότητα των ανθρώπινων ελπίδων, όσο μια δημόσια βιβλιοθήκη

By Numbers here from Shame or Censure free,
All Crimes are safe, but hated Poverty.
This, only this, the rigid Law persues,
This, only this, provokes the snarling Muse.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.