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The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting.
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
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Fleeting
Expenses
Ridiculous
Position
Pleasure
Damnable
Expense
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.
Samuel Johnson
The animadversions of critics are commonly such as may easily provoke the sedatest writer to some quickness of resentment and asperity of reply.
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Men become friends by a community of pleasures.
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Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.
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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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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.
Samuel Johnson
Words are but the signs of ideas.
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
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
Samuel Johnson
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
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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
What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.
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An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.
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Genius now and then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance which owes nothing to the subject.
Samuel Johnson
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
Samuel Johnson
Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
Samuel Johnson
Babies do not want to hear about babies they like to be told of giants and castles.
Samuel Johnson
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.
Samuel Johnson
Inquiries into the heart are not for man.
Samuel Johnson
No wonder, Sir, that he is vain a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.
Samuel Johnson
