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These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.

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
Purpose
Pompous
Common
Adequate
Use
Papers
Life
Purposes
Volume
Uses
Newspapers
Volumes
Paper
Durable

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No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.
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I remember a passage in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.
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Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science.
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That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.
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No knowledge is useless, with the exception of heraldry.
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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.
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Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it.
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A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.
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This is my history like all other histories, a narrative of misery.
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Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
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There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.
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In the condition of men, it frequently happens that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort as in the works of nature, the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.
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There is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber.
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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.
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Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.
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The equity of Providence has balanced peculiar sufferings with peculiar enjoyments.
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A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
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Women have two weapons - cosmetics and tears
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Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who while he was chill was harmless but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison.
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How small of all that human hearts endure/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
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