Quotes from Samuel Johnson

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

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

Complaints are vain; we will try to. do better another time. To-morrow and to-morrow. A few designs and a few failures, and the time of designing is past.

Prejudice is a great time-saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts. Prejudice not being founded on reason cannot be removed by argument.

History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

With what hope can we endeavor to persuade the ladies that the time spent at the toilet is lost in vanity.

The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

We never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart.

And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.

Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.

A soldier's time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption.

No wonder, Sir, that he is vain; a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.

Mutual complacency is the atmosphere of conjugal love.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

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

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.