Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Men seldom give pleasure when they are not pleased themselves.
Samuel Johnson
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Pleasure
Give
Giving
Men
Pleased
Seldom
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
Samuel Johnson
The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of a giddy libertine or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.
Samuel Johnson
In all pleasures hope is a considerable part.
Samuel Johnson
Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
Samuel Johnson
No one ever became great by imitation.
Samuel Johnson
Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
Samuel Johnson
If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.
Samuel Johnson
Reason elevates our thoughts as high as the stars, and leads us through the vast space of this mighty fabric yet it comes far short of the real extent of our corporeal being.
Samuel Johnson
Your aspirations are your possibilities.
Samuel Johnson
Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
Samuel Johnson
No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.
Samuel Johnson
I have always said the first Whig was the Devil.
Samuel Johnson
Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.
Samuel Johnson
The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.
Samuel Johnson
People seldom read a book which is given to them and few are given. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price. No man will send to buy a thing that costs even sixpence without an intention to read it.
Samuel Johnson
But the distant hope of being one day useful or eminent ought not to mislead us too far from that study which is equally requisite to the great and mean, to the celebrated and obscure the art of moderating the desires, of repressing the appetites and of conciliating or retaining the favour of mankind.
Samuel Johnson
It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
Samuel Johnson
What is the reason that women servants ... have much lower wages than men servants ... when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?
Samuel Johnson
Whatever you have spend less.
Samuel Johnson
