Quotes from Samuel Johnson

Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired... Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

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.

I do not care to speak ill of a man behind his back, but I believe he is an attorney.

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.

I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire.

Nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more.

Happiness, said he, must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

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

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

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.

Being in a ship is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.

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.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness. ( On the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers )

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

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

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

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