Quotes from Samuel Johnson

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

This mournful truth is ev'rywhere confessed—Slow rises worth, by poverty depress'd.

Boswell: That, sir, was great fortitude of mind.Johnson: No, sir; stark insensibility.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

[Of Pembroke College:] Sir, we are a nest of singing birds.

To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not easily be made.

Let observation with extensive viewSurvey mankind, from China to Peru.

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

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

The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence.

A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

No, Sir, it is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

When learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foesFirst rear'd the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose;Each change of many-color'd life he drew,Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new:Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.

Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.

I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.

Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.