Samuel Johnson Quotes

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings

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.

I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.

I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire.

I do not care to speak ill of a man behind his back, but I believe he is an attorney.

Nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more.

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

"Be not too hasty," said Imlac, "to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men."

Being in a ship is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.