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The eye of the mind, like that of the body, can only extend its view to new objects, by losing sight of those which are now before it.

Samuel Johnson

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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
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Mind
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Like
Losing
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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To scatter praise or blame without regard to justice is to destroy the distinction of good and evil. Many have no other test of actions than general opinion and all are so far influenced by a sense of reputation that they are often restrained by fear of reproach, and excited by hope of honour, when other principles have lost their power.
Samuel Johnson
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Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
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Ignorance cannot always be inferred from inaccuracy knowledge is not always present.
Samuel Johnson
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All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
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No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Samuel Johnson
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Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls.
Samuel Johnson
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It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.
Samuel Johnson
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Books, says Lord Bacon, can never teach us the use of books the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice. No man should think so highly of himself as to think he can receive but little light from books no one so meanly, as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.
Samuel Johnson
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So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.
Samuel Johnson
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You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.
Samuel Johnson
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I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson
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Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
Samuel Johnson
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To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.
Samuel Johnson
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What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country.
Samuel Johnson
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There is a certain degree of temptation which will overcome any virtue. Now, in so far as you approach temptation to a man, you do him an injury and, if he is overcome, you share his guilt.
Samuel Johnson
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We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.
Samuel Johnson
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The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.
Samuel Johnson
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A man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It is a miserable thing when the conversation can only be such as whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that.
Samuel Johnson
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When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
Samuel Johnson
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If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced if of ill-fortune, to be pitied and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
Samuel Johnson