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Slander is the revenge of a coward, and dissimulation of his defense.

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
Dissimulation
Defamation
Slander
Coward
Revenge
Defense

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If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced if of ill-fortune, to be pitied and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
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Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.
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Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
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A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
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I wish you would add an index rerum, that when the reader recollects any incident he may easily find it.
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Remember that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.
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Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
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Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim and when you are calculating, calculate.
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The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
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We may have many acquaintances, but we can have but few friends this made Aristotle say that he that hath many friends hath none.
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Spring is the season of gaiety, and winter of terror in spring the heart of tranquility dances to the melody of the groves, and the eye of benevolence sparkles at the sight of happiness and plenty: in winter, compassion melts at universal calamity, and the tear of softness starts at the wailing of hunger and the cries of the creation in distress
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All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
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Virtue is too often merely local.
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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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One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
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Babies do not want to hear about babies they like to be told of giants and castles.
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Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood it is the crime of cowards.
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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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Advice is offensive, it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves.
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I do not see, Sir, that it is reasonable for a man to be angry at another, whom a woman has preferred to him but angry he is, no doubt and he is loath to be angry at himself.
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