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An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Poetry cannot be translation
Samuel Johnson
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Samuel Johnson
An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.
Samuel Johnson
A fallible being will fail somewhere.
Samuel Johnson
It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.
Samuel Johnson
Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing is more common than for men to make partial and absurd distinctions between vices of equal enormity, and to observe some of the divine commands with great scrupulousness, while they violate others, equally important, without any concern, or the least apparent conciousness of guilt. Alas, it is only wisdom which perceives this tragedy.
Samuel Johnson
Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.
Samuel Johnson
Of all the griefs that harass the distress'd, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.
Samuel Johnson
Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
Samuel Johnson
Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things, when they are shown their form or told their use.
Samuel Johnson
The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
Samuel Johnson
We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor
Samuel Johnson
Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.
Samuel Johnson
When there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.
Samuel Johnson
Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance, or to extinguish the desire of fond endearments and tender officiousness and, therefore, no one should think it unnecessary to learn those arts by which friendship may be gained.
Samuel Johnson
