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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.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
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Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Happiness
Shame
Back
Neither
Virtuously
Able
Sorrow
Usefully
Look
Certainly
Tokens
Looks
Progress
Excite
Life
Memories
Recollection
Existence
Trace
Greater
Employed

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Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.
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The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside
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Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant
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In civilized society we all depend upon each other, and our happiness is very much owing to the good opinion of mankind.
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Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
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A mere literary man is a dull man a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.
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Fear naturally quickens the flight of guilt.
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You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.
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Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.
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Security will produce danger.
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Of all the griefs that harass the distress'd, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.
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Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible
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High people, sir, are the best take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.
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To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it and seeing one is quite enough.
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The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind.
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A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one.
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Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
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Discord generally operates in little things it is inflamed ... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.
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Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it.
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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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