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Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
When we see our enemies and friends gliding away before us, let us not forget that we are subject to the general law of mortality, and shall soon be where our doom will be fixed forever.
Samuel Johnson
Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
Samuel Johnson
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
Samuel Johnson
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
Samuel Johnson
Pension: An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.
Samuel Johnson
Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted let me serve Thee with active zeal, humbled confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge.
Samuel Johnson
The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
Pain and disease awaken us to convictions which are necessary to our moral condition.
Samuel Johnson
Sir, if a man has a mind to prance, he must study at Christ Church and All Souls.
Samuel Johnson
It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.
Samuel Johnson
A cow is a very good animal in the field but we turn her out of a garden.
Samuel Johnson
It is better a man should be abused than forgotten.
Samuel Johnson
It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.
Samuel Johnson
A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.
Samuel Johnson
Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
Samuel Johnson
The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
Samuel Johnson
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
Samuel Johnson
