Quotes from Samuel Johnson

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

A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.

Man is not weak - knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanics laughs at strength.

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

I live in the crowds of jollity not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country.

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.

Pendantry is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. It may be discovered either in the choice of a subject or in the manner d treating it.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

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.

Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing.

Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship.

I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from learning to be wise. There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,- Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.