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The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Fortune
Complaint
Excite
Complaints
Contempt
Usual
Complaining
Pity

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I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.
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Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
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I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
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It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.
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You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.
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We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual pleasures
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We go from anticipation to anticipation, not from satisfaction to satisfaction.
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An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
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Mutual cowardice keeps us in peace.
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When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed
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Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.
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To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
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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.
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Condemned to Hope's delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts or slow decline Our social comforts drop away.
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The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
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Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
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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.
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Every man is of importance to himself.
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The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.
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You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
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