Samuel Johnson Quotes

As the Spanish proverb says, "He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

APPEARER (APPE'ARER) n.s.[from To appear.]The person that appears. That owls and ravens are ominous appearers, and presignify unlucky events, was an augurial conception.Brown’sVul. Err.

Hunting was the labour of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England.

He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?
Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?

Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.

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.

I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.

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

Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things — the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.