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To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Literary Critic
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Tongue
Invariable
Virtue
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Prerogative
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Innocence
Granted
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside
Samuel Johnson
Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.
Samuel Johnson
No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.
Samuel Johnson
The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public.
Samuel Johnson
Every man's affairs, however little, are important to himself.
Samuel Johnson
What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country.
Samuel Johnson
Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
Samuel Johnson
The desires of man increase with his acquisitions.
Samuel Johnson
I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Samuel Johnson
Applause abates diligence.
Samuel Johnson
Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.
Samuel Johnson
Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions
Samuel Johnson
Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.
Samuel Johnson
Modern writers are the moons of literature they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
Samuel Johnson
All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.
Samuel Johnson
Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
Samuel Johnson
