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Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.

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
Age
Experience
Form
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Flattering
Cautious
Suspects
Tells
Credit

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Our aspirations are our possibilities.
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Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.
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Every man that has felt pain knows how little all other comforts can gladden him to whom health is denied. Yet who is there does not sometimes hazard it for the enjoyment of an hour?
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A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.
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Wealth is nothing in itself it is not useful but when it departs from us.
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If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.
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Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.
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There are occasions on which all apology is rudeness.
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Much is due to those who first broke the way to knowledge, and left only to their successors the task of smoothing it.
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Men have been wise in many different modes but they have always laughed the same way.
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Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
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Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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Example is always more efficacious than precept.
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Governors being accustomed to hear of more crimes than they can punish, and more wrongs than they can redress, set themselves at ease by indiscriminate negligence, and presently forget the request when they lose sight of the petitioner.
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Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?
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One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
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Your manuscript is both good and original but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
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Every man may be observed to have a certain strain of lamentation, some peculiar theme of complaint on which he dwells in his moments of dejection.
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Many leave the labours of half their life to their executors and to chance, because they will not send them abroad unfinished, and are unable to finish them, having prescribed to themselves such a degree of exactness as human diligence can scarcely ontain.
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Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.
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