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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
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.
Samuel Johnson
Books, says Lord Bacon, can never teach us the use of books the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice. No man should think so highly of himself as to think he can receive but little light from books no one so meanly, as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.
Samuel Johnson
I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.
Samuel Johnson
High people, sir, are the best take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.
Samuel Johnson
Those authors are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence.
Samuel Johnson
In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.
Samuel Johnson
It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
Samuel Johnson
It is not possible to be regarded with tenderness, except by a few. That merit which gives greatness and renown diffuses its influence to a wide compass, but acts weakly on every single breast it is placed at a distance from common spectators, and shines like one of the remote stars, of which the light reaches us, but not the heat.
Samuel Johnson
Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.
Samuel Johnson
They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty.
Samuel Johnson
This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
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
The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind.
Samuel Johnson
An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
Samuel Johnson
The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.
Samuel Johnson
In misery's darkest cavern known, His useful care was ever nigh Where hopeless anguish pour'd his groan, And lonely want retir'd to die.
Samuel Johnson
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
Samuel Johnson
Knock the 't' off the 'can't.'
Samuel Johnson
Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.
Samuel Johnson
The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another.
Samuel Johnson
