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Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
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Life
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Pain
Towns
Ostentatious
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Morality
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Littles
Mass
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Little
General
Wit
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Occasions
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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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
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One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
Samuel Johnson
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You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
Samuel Johnson
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Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.
Samuel Johnson
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Slander is the revenge of a coward, and dissimulation of his defense.
Samuel Johnson
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No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.
Samuel Johnson
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Levellers wish to level down as far as themselves but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.
Samuel Johnson
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As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.
Samuel Johnson
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Liberty is the parent of truth, but truth and decency are sometimes at variance. All men and all propositions are to be treated here as they deserve, and there are many who have no claim either to respect or decency.
Samuel Johnson
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Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
Samuel Johnson
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The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.
Samuel Johnson
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Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
Samuel Johnson
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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
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You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.
Samuel Johnson
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You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful income.
Samuel Johnson
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Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
Samuel Johnson
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The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public.
Samuel Johnson
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Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.
Samuel Johnson
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Poetry cannot be translation
Samuel Johnson
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Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new.
Samuel Johnson