Top 1762 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Johnson - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Samuel Johnson.
Last updated on April 15, 2025.
Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.
Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.
There are charms made only for distant admiration.
At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.
Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?
He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.
Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
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.
Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.
The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.
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.
Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.
What is easy is seldom excellent.
Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
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