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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

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Dr Johnson
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Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.
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Round numbers are always false.
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The liberty of using harmless pleasure will not be disputed but it is still to be examined what pleasures are harmless.
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The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.
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Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.
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A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.
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Nothing can be truly great which is not right.
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All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
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The first step to greatness is to be honest.
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He that pines with hunger, is in little care how others shall be fed. The poor man is seldom studious to make his grandson rich.
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Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science.
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Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
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Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
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A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.
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A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.
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Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
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The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart with.
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Yet reason frowns in war's unequal game, Where wasted nations raise a single name And mortgag'd states their grandsire's wreaths regret, From age to age in everlasting debt Wreaths which at last the dear-bought right convey To rust on medals, or on stones decay.
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Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty, and of ease, and the beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health.
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