Top 1762 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Johnson - Page 27

The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform. It is true, that no diligence can ascertain success; death may intercept the swiftest career; but he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking has at least the honour of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle, though he missed the victory.

More knowledge may be gained of a man's real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.

The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.

It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

To a people warlike and indigent, an incursion into a rich country is never hurtful.

When female minds are embittered by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.

Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.

As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.

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.

You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.

Let him that desires to see others happy, make haste to give while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction.

It is necessary to the success of flattery, that it be accommodated to particular circumstances or characters, and enter the heart on that side where the passions are ready to receive it.

God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.

Of all the grief's that harass the distressed; sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.

Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.

Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible.

If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Men have solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it.

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

Flattery pleases very generally. In the first place, the flatterer may think what he says to be true; but, in the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he certainly thinks those whom he flatters of consequence enough to be flattered.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Books without the knowledge of life are useless.

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.

That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.

The most Heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard; to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance. It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

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

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

He endearing elegance of female friendship.

Long customs are not easily broken; he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain; and how shall we do that for others, which we are seldom able to do for ourselves.

Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

High people, sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.

The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost must always end in pain.