Quote

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

Samuel Johnson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Must
Life
People
Refinement
Simplicity
Bear
Bears

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

Image
Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.
Samuel Johnson
Image
He who endeavors to please must appear pleased.
Samuel Johnson
Image
Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.
Samuel Johnson
Image
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
Samuel Johnson
Image
A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.
Samuel Johnson
Image
The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another.
Samuel Johnson
Image
He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.
Samuel Johnson
Image
If the man who turnips cries, Cry not when his father dies, 'Tis proof that he had rather Have a turnip than his father.
Samuel Johnson
Image
Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.
Samuel Johnson
Image
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
Samuel Johnson
Image
The difference between coarse and refined abuse is the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow.
Samuel Johnson
Image
People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them.
Samuel Johnson
Image
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
Samuel Johnson
Image
When a Man is tried of London, he is tired of life.
Samuel Johnson
Image
Let him go abroad to a distant country let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.
Samuel Johnson
Image
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.
Samuel Johnson
Image
Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.
Samuel Johnson
Image
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
Samuel Johnson
Image
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.
Samuel Johnson
Image
Who left nothing of authorship untouched, and touched nothing which he did not adorn. [Lat., Qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.]
Samuel Johnson