Quotes by Samuel Johnson

Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]

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

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye, and while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind us is always lessening, and that which we approach increasing in magnitude.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings. Samuel Johnson

[C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.

This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Dont, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome. -

men do not suspect faults which they do not commit

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

The true art of memory, is the art of attention