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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
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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
And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.
Samuel Johnson
The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.
Samuel Johnson
The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of a giddy libertine or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.
Samuel Johnson
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
Samuel Johnson
Discord generally operates in little things it is inflamed ... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.
Samuel Johnson
Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
Samuel Johnson
Ignorance cannot always be inferred from inaccuracy knowledge is not always present.
Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Samuel Johnson
These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.
Samuel Johnson
Domestic discord is not inevitably and fatally necessary but yet it is not easy to avoid.
Samuel Johnson
It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.
Samuel Johnson
Mutual cowardice keeps us in peace.
Samuel Johnson
Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
Samuel Johnson
I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
Samuel Johnson
Life, however short, is made still shorter by waste of time.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.
Samuel Johnson
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
He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.
Samuel Johnson
