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Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Difficulty
Higher
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Surmounting
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Difficulties
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.
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
It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
Samuel Johnson
There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.
Samuel Johnson
It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.
Samuel Johnson
Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim and when you are calculating, calculate.
Samuel Johnson
Art hath an enemy called ignorance.
Samuel Johnson
Learn the leading precognita of all things-no need to turn over leaf by leaf, but grasp the trunk hard and you will shake all the branches. Advice cherished by Samuel Johnson that that, if one is to master any subject, one must first discover its general principles.
Samuel Johnson
Many leave the labours of half their life to their executors and to chance, because they will not send them abroad unfinished, and are unable to finish them, having prescribed to themselves such a degree of exactness as human diligence can scarcely ontain.
Samuel Johnson
Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
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
Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.
Samuel Johnson
The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.
Samuel Johnson
The world is seldom what it seems to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.
Samuel Johnson
Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
Samuel Johnson
Faults and defects every work of man must have.
Samuel Johnson
A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.
Samuel Johnson
Most minds are the slaves of external circumstances, and conform to any hand that undertakes to mould them.
Samuel Johnson
I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society. There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.
Samuel Johnson
