Samuel Johnson Quotes

Samuel Johnson Quotes

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

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

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

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.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.

To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.

Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life . . . the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.

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.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

No one is much pleased with a companion who does not increase, in some respect, their fondness for themselves.

Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

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

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.

men do not suspect faults which they do not commit

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

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