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The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.

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
Upon
Superiors
Disposes
Art
Arts
Propagate
Another
Receive
Labors
Firsts
Communicate
Rapture
First
Lovers
Eloquence
Time
Ambition
Impose
Criticism
Sensibility
Labor
Superior
Imposture

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Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
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To do nothing is in everyone's power.
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All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.
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What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country.
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If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still
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If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary be not idle.
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Most minds are the slaves of external circumstances, and conform to any hand that undertakes to mould them.
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No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.
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Let him go abroad to a distant country let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.
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A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
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He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar and many fold in their passage while they lie waiting for the gale.
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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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If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced if of ill-fortune, to be pitied and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
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To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.
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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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This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
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It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.
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There is ... scarcely any species of writing of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents every new genius produces some innovation, which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established.
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A fallible being will fail somewhere.
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Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.
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