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Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

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
Name
Names
Poor
Superfluities
Makes
Necessaries
Nature
Custom
Giving
Customs
Poverty
Gives

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Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
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The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
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In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
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Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.
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Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science.
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How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives
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The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species to remark general properties and large appearances.
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Advice is offensive, it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves.
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Politeness is fictitious benevolence.
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In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.
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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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When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.
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Hunger is never delicate they who are seldom gorged to the full with praise may be safely fed with gross compliments, for the appetite must be satisfied before it is disgusted.
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There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.
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People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them.
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There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.
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It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.
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I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.
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It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman.
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