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The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.

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
Grief
Happiness
Desire
Life
World
Griefs
Fears
Desires

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Those who are in the power of evil habits must conquer them as they can and conquered they must be, or neither wisdom nor happiness can be attained: but those who are not yet subject to their influence may, by timely caution, preserve their freedom.
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The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.
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The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy their real faults are immediately detected and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added.
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Every human being whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.
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The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
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A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation, or remote enquiries.
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Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
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The end of writing is to instruct the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.
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Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre
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Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world.
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The desires of man increase with his acquisitions.
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The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.
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Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.
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The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
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When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
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Still we love The evil we do, until we suffer it.
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A married man has many cares, but a bachelor no pleasures.
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The insolence of wealth will creep out.
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As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.
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This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
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