Samuel Johnson Quotes

"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.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.

"In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness."

(On the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers)

Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.

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.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.

Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.

A second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.