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All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor.

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
Errors
Benefactor
Valuable
Rectify
Criticism
Satirical
Judgment
Benefactors
Taste
Improves
Public
Error
Truth
Useful
May
Considered
Refines

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The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.
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No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
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Cunning has effect from the credulity of others, rather than from the abilities of those who are cunning. It requires no extraordinary talents to lie and deceive.
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Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
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The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality.
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Everybody knows worse of himself than he knows of other men.
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The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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Knowledge always desires increase, it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.
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A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
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If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion.
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The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
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No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.
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Riches, perhaps, do not so often produce crimes as incite accusers.
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Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
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Faults and defects every work of man must have.
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When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life for there is in London all that life can afford.
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Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
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We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
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As a madman is apt to think himself grown suddenly great, so he that grows suddenly great is apt to borrow a little from the madman.
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Unless a woman has an amorous heart, she is a dull companion.
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