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The violence of war admits no distinction the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

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
Sometimes
Gentleness
Innocence
Distinction
Guilt
Violence
War
Lance
Fall
Admits
Power
Lifted

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Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.
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Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
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There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
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It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
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Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.
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This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.
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Luxury, so far as it reaches the people, will do good to the race of people it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury for, as I said before it can reach but a very few.
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The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart with.
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The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.
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[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.
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Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
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If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion.
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A small country town is not the place in which one would choose to quarrel with a wife every human being in such places is a spy.
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Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience you will find it a calamity.
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We may have uneasy feelings for seeing a creature in distress without pity for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them.
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No one ever became great by imitation.
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Books, says Lord Bacon, can never teach us the use of books the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice. No man should think so highly of himself as to think he can receive but little light from books no one so meanly, as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.
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Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.
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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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When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life for there is in London all that life can afford.
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