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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
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Love
Zeal
Afterwards
Wakefield
Passages
Expunge
Fool
Goldsmith
Remember
Vicar
Nothing
Vicars
Enough
Zealous
Men
Passage
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
Samuel Johnson
Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.
Samuel Johnson
A man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It is a miserable thing when the conversation can only be such as whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that.
Samuel Johnson
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson
No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.
Samuel Johnson
We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.
Samuel Johnson
Happiness, said he, must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty.
Samuel Johnson
We go from anticipation to anticipation, not from satisfaction to satisfaction.
Samuel Johnson
There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
Samuel Johnson
A woman of fortune being used the handling of money, spends it judiciously but a woman who gets the command of money for the first time upon her marriage, has such a gust in spending it, that she throws it away with great profusion.
Samuel Johnson
Faction seldom leaves a man honest, however it might find him.
Samuel Johnson
I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
Samuel Johnson
Luxury, so far as it reaches the people, will do good to the race of people it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury for, as I said before it can reach but a very few.
Samuel Johnson
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Samuel Johnson
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
Knock the 't' off the 'can't.'
Samuel Johnson
Don't tell me of deception a lie is a lie, whether it be a lie to the eye or a lie to the ear.
Samuel Johnson
How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die: that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever!
Samuel Johnson
At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.
Samuel Johnson
