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Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

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
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Debt
Praise
Present
Flattery

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Political liberty is only good insofar as it produces private liberty.
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I will take no more physick, not even my opiates for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.
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The vicious count their years virtuous, their acts.
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We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
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Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
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Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.
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Wine gives a man nothing... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
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Slander is the revenge of a coward, and dissimulation of his defense.
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When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
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We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual pleasures
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New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.
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The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.
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Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.
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Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.
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There ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.
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Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.
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The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.
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Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.
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An exotic and irrational entertainment.
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Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
Samuel Johnson