Quotes from Samuel Johnson

This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

London! the needy villain's general home, The common sewer of Paris and of Rome! With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

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.

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.

Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.

All industry must be excited by hope.

We all live upon the hope of pleasing somebody, and the pleasure of pleasing ought to be greatest, and at last always will be greatest, when our endeavours are exerted in consequence of our duty.

In all pleasure hope is a considerable part.

Hope is itself a species of happiness and perhaps the chief happiness which this world affords.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

The necessities of our condition require a thousand offices of tenderness, which mere regard for the species will never dictate.

The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.

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

Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

Good-humor is a state between gayety and unconcern,--the act or emanation of a mind at leisure to regard the gratification of another.