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To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

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
State
Fortunate
Tasting
Pain
Pity
Exclusion
Feelings
Solitude
Gloomy
Others
Exciting
Adding
States
Marriage
Pains
Balm
Live
Mankind
Retreat
Celibacy
Without
Feeling
Pleasures
Afflicted
Many
Pleasure
Sympathy
Felicity

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He that would travel for the entertainment of others should remember that the great object of remark is human life.
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As he that lives longest lives but a little while, every man may be certain that he has no time to waste. The duties of life are commensurate to its duration and every day brings its task, which, if neglected, is doubled on the morrow.
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Where there is emulation, there will be vanity where there is vanity, there will be folly.
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New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.
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While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
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Books have always a secret influence on the understanding we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas he that reads books of science, thogh without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing.
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Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world.
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Merit rather enforces respect than attracts fondness.
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What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it for folly doesn't deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.
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The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.
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Long customs are not easily broken he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain and how shall we do that for others, which we are seldom able to do for ourselves.
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Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.
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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.
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Distance either of time or place is sufficient to reconcile weak minds to wonderful relations.
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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.
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A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.
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Women have two weapons - cosmetics and tears
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It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
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A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.
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