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Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet.
Samuel Johnson
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
Samuel Johnson
We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor
Samuel Johnson
Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
Samuel Johnson
Terrestrial happiness is of short duration. The brightness of the flame is wasting its fuel the fragrant flower is passing away in its own odors.
Samuel Johnson
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
Samuel Johnson
Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves
Samuel Johnson
Avarice is a uniform and tractable vice other intellectual distempers are different in different constitutions of mind. That which soothes the pride of one will offend the pride of another, but to the favor of the covetous bring money, and nothing is denied.
Samuel Johnson
A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.
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.
Samuel Johnson
The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species to remark general properties and large appearances.
Samuel Johnson
As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.
Samuel Johnson
Pound St. Paul's Church into atoms, and consider any single atom it is to be sure, good for nothing but put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul's Church. So it is with human felicity, which is made up of many ingredients, each of which may be shown to be very insignificant.
Samuel Johnson
As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness if often covered by turbulence and hurry.
Samuel Johnson
Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
Samuel Johnson
In the condition of men, it frequently happens that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort as in the works of nature, the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.
Samuel Johnson
Few things are so liberally bestowed, or squandered with so little effect, as good advice.
Samuel Johnson
Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Samuel Johnson
Advice is offensive, it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.
Samuel Johnson
