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Jesting, often, only proves a want of intellect.
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
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Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Jesting
Proves
Intellect
Prove
Often
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.
Samuel Johnson
The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Samuel Johnson
He who writes much will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted.
Samuel Johnson
Every man, however hopeless his pretensions may appear, has some project by which he hopes to rise to reputation some art by which he imagines that the attention of the world will be attracted some quality, good or bad, which discriminates him from the common herd of mortals, and by which others may be persuaded to love, or compelled to fear him.
Samuel Johnson
It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
Samuel Johnson
A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
Samuel Johnson
It is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it.
Samuel Johnson
Apologies are seldom of any use.
Samuel Johnson
It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.
Samuel Johnson
Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing is more idle than to inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach.
Samuel Johnson
Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
Samuel Johnson
...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.
Samuel Johnson
Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
Samuel Johnson
This is my history like all other histories, a narrative of misery.
Samuel Johnson
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson
Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.
Samuel Johnson
There is ... scarcely any species of writing of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents every new genius produces some innovation, which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established.
Samuel Johnson
