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Glory, the casual gift of thoughtless crowds! Glory, the bribe of avaricious virtue!

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
Gift
Glory
Virtue
Avaricious
Thoughtless
Bribe
Casual
Crowds

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Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
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All power of fancy over reason is a degree of madness.
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Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.
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Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
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Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages.
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Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.
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Long customs are not easily broken he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain and how shall we do that for others, which we are seldom able to do for ourselves.
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Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.
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He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar and many fold in their passage while they lie waiting for the gale.
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Misery is caused for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, which canker enjoyment, and undermine security. The visit of an invader is necessarily rare, but domestic animosities allow no cessation.
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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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He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
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The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.
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The maxim of Cleobulus, Mediocrity is best, has been long considered a universal principle, extending through the whole compass of life and nature. The experience of every age seems to have given it new confirmation, and to show that nothing, however specious or alluring, is pursued with propriety or enjoyed with safety beyond certain limits.
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Truth has no gradations nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true.
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We go from anticipation to anticipation, not from satisfaction to satisfaction.
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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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Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.
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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.
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It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
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