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A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.

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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I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society. There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.
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Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is but it is not easy to tell what it is.
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A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write.
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Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour.
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Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from time to come.
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You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.
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Happiness, said he, must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty.
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Nothing can be truly great which is not right.
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.
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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.
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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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The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.
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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.
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Diffidence may check resolution and obstruct performance, but compensates its embarrassments by more important advantages it conciliates the proud, and softens the severe averts envy from excellence, and censure from miscarriage.
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Care that is once enter'd into the breast Will have the whole possession ere it rest.
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It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
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Foppery is never cured it is the bad stamina of the mind, which, like those of the body, are never rectified once a coxcomb always a coxcomb.
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One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
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