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Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected that which elevates must always surprise.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Lichfield
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Dr Johnson
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If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced if of ill-fortune, to be pitied and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
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Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
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I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
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We ought not to raise expectations which it is not in our power to satisfy.-It is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.
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There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.
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The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.
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We go from anticipation to anticipation, not from satisfaction to satisfaction.
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People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.
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No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
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There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.
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Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.
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Such is the constitution of Man that labor may be said to be its own re-ward.
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I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.
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So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
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Truth allows no choice.
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Governors being accustomed to hear of more crimes than they can punish, and more wrongs than they can redress, set themselves at ease by indiscriminate negligence, and presently forget the request when they lose sight of the petitioner.
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But the distant hope of being one day useful or eminent ought not to mislead us too far from that study which is equally requisite to the great and mean, to the celebrated and obscure the art of moderating the desires, of repressing the appetites and of conciliating or retaining the favour of mankind.
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It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God whether God is just whether this life is the only state of existence.
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Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labor and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other such are the changes that keep the mind in action: we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated we desire something else and begin a new pursuit.
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