Quotes from Samuel Johnson

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

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Cunning differs from wisdom as twilight from open day.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

It is scarcely credible to what degree discernment may be dazzled by the mist of pride, and wisdom infatuated by the intoxication of flattery.

The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.

Celestial wisdom calms the mind.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

A married man has many cares, but a bachelor no pleasures.

I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.

Marriages would in general be as happy and often more so if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

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

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.

If the man who turnips cries, Cry not when his father dies, 'Tis proof that he had rather Have a turnip than his father.

I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.