Quote

If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.

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
Book
Quitting
Feel
Begins
Feels
Beginning
Men
Perhaps
Middle
Reading
Read
Inclination
May
Quit

More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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The desires of man increase with his acquisitions.
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So scanty is our present allowance of happiness that in many situations life could scarcely be supported if hope were not allowed to relieve the present hour by pleasures borrowed from the future.
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To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it and seeing one is quite enough.
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Try and forget our cares and sickness, and contribute, as we can to the happiness of each other.
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I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children and those who marry early, with their partners.
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Labor's face is wrinkled with the wind, and swarthy with the sun.
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If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.
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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.
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An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
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Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
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A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.
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We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.
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Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
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A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.
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If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
Samuel Johnson
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Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience you will find it a calamity.
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No one will persist long in helping someone who will not help themselves.
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Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.
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Words are but the signs of ideas.
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To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.
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