Samuel Johnson Quotes

I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.

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

His conversation does not show the minute-hand, but he strikes the hour very correctly.

Hawkesworth said of Johnson, "You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world."

The limbs will quiver and move after the soul is gone.

As with my hat upon my head
I walk'd along the Strand,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.

Blown about with every wind of criticism.

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

He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.

The potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

I remember a passage in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: "I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing."... There was another fine passage too which he struck out: "When I was a young man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over; for I found that generally what was new was false."

The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.

Johnson said that he could repeat a complete chapter of "The Natural History of Iceland" from the Danish of Horrebow, the whole of which was exactly thus: "There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island." 62 [Chap. lxxii.]

Goldsmith, however, was a man who whatever he wrote, did it better than any other man could do.

He was so generally civil that nobody thanked him for it.