Quotes from Samuel Johnson

Clear your mind of can't.

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

What is written without effort in general is read without pleasure.

When the hoary Sage replied,"Come, my lad, and drink some beer."

Cold approbation gave the ling'ring bays,For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise.

As the Spanish proverb says, "He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.

There are people whom one should like very well to drop, but would not wish to be dropped by.

There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.

The wild vicissitudes of taste.

Excise—A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

Officious, innocent, sincere,Of every friendless name the friend.

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

Among the calamities of war, may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.

To a poet nothing can be useless.

Tomorrow I purpose to regulate my room.

Don't attitudenize.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance.

For we that live to please must please to live.

How small, of all that human hearts endure,That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,Our own felicity we make or find.