Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
As all error is meanness, it is incumbent on every man who consults his own dignity, to retract it as soon as he discovers it.
Samuel Johnson
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Soon
Retract
Every
Incumbent
Men
Incumbents
Discovers
Meanness
Error
Errors
Dignity
Consults
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions, or delightful images and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit to other things.
Samuel Johnson
Avarice is a uniform and tractable vice other intellectual distempers are different in different constitutions of mind. That which soothes the pride of one will offend the pride of another, but to the favor of the covetous bring money, and nothing is denied.
Samuel Johnson
Language is the dress of thought and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy
Samuel Johnson
The great effect of friendship is beneficence, yet by the first act of uncommon kindness it is endangered.
Samuel Johnson
Attainment is followed by neglect, possession by disgust, and the malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may be applied to many another course of life, that its two days of happiness are the first and the last
Samuel Johnson
Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
Samuel Johnson
Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.
Samuel Johnson
Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience you will find it a calamity.
Samuel Johnson
It is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. You may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learned them both.
Samuel Johnson
Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands.
Samuel Johnson
Pour forth thy fervors for a healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resigned
Samuel Johnson
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
Samuel Johnson
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
Samuel Johnson
One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.
Samuel Johnson
Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
Samuel Johnson
To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist.
Samuel Johnson
And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.
Samuel Johnson
The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.
Samuel Johnson
A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.
Samuel Johnson
