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Modern writers are the moons of literature they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
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
Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.
Samuel Johnson
Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant
Samuel Johnson
The future is bought with the present.
Samuel Johnson
It is better to live rich than to die rich.
Samuel Johnson
Self-love is a busy prompter.
Samuel Johnson
All envy is proportionate to desire we are uneasy at the attainments of another, according as we think our own happiness would be advanced by the addition of that which he withholds from us.
Samuel Johnson
Large offers and sturdy rejections are among the most common topics of falsehood.
Samuel Johnson
All is not gold that glitters, as we have often been told and the adage is verified in your place and my favour but if what happens does not make us richer, we must bid it welcome, if it makes us wiser.
Samuel Johnson
Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.
Samuel Johnson
Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it.
Samuel Johnson
Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.
Samuel Johnson
The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence.
Samuel Johnson
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
What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.
Samuel Johnson
They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty.
Samuel Johnson
I will take no more physick, not even my opiates for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.
Samuel Johnson
The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, were exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue.
Samuel Johnson
One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.
Samuel Johnson
Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Samuel Johnson
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
Samuel Johnson
