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The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.

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
Accidents
Useful
Universal
Humanity
Always
Unconnected
Customs
Truths

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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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Riches, perhaps, do not so often produce crimes as incite accusers.
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Language is the dress of thought and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy
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What signifies protesting so against flattery when a person speaks well of one, it must either be true or false, you know if true, let us rejoice in his good opinion if he lies, it is a proof at least that he loves more to please me, than to sit s
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Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
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Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.
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Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.
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In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.
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When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.
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Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.
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Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.
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One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.
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There is no book so poor that it would not be a prodigy if wholly made by a single man.
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Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
Samuel Johnson
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I remember a passage in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.
Samuel Johnson
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How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consigned, Our own felicity we make or find. With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
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Virtue is too often merely local.
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Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much Who, born for the Universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
Samuel Johnson
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All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.
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That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.
Samuel Johnson