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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.

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
Men
Passage
Love
Zeal
Afterwards
Wakefield
Passages
Expunge
Fool
Goldsmith
Remember
Vicar
Nothing
Vicars
Enough
Zealous

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Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.
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No man tells his opinion so freely as when he imagines it received with implicit veneration.
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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.
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Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?
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Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.
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Men become friends by a community of pleasures.
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Men are like stone jugs - you may lug them where you like by the ears.
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The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
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No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.
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As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.
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Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible
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How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives
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Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
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Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.
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Sir, if a man has a mind to prance, he must study at Christ Church and All Souls.
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Every man's affairs, however little, are important to himself.
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To build is to be robbed.
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