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Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.
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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Overcome
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Performed
Despair
Idleness
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Often
Defeated
Forbear
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Timidity
Without
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Do not ... hope wholly to reason away your troubles do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind.
Samuel Johnson
The difference between coarse and refined abuse is the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow.
Samuel Johnson
The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind.
Samuel Johnson
To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it and seeing one is quite enough.
Samuel Johnson
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
The perfect day for quitting is not real. It will never come, so might as well start today
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
The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.
Samuel Johnson
No one ever became great by imitation.
Samuel Johnson
Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.
Samuel Johnson
Conjecture as to things useful, is good but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle.
Samuel Johnson
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
Samuel Johnson
All this [wealth] excludes but one evil, poverty.
Samuel Johnson
He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
Samuel Johnson
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.
Samuel Johnson
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
Samuel Johnson
Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.
Samuel Johnson
Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
Samuel Johnson
Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
Samuel Johnson
