Quotes from Samuel Johnson

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things--the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.

The world is not yet exhaused; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.

You must have taken great pains, sir; you could not naturally been so very stupid.

You teach your daugthers the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

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

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

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.

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

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

Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

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.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

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

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.