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Wit is that which has been often thought, but never before was well expressed.

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
Expressed
Wit
Often
Thought
Wells
Well
Never

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Virtue is too often merely local.
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No man can have much kindness for him by whom he does not believe himself esteemed, and nothing so evidently proves esteem as imitation.
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Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
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Sir, there is no end of negative criticism.
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His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void And sure the Eternal Master found The single talent well employed.
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The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality.
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All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.
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You raise your voice when you should reinforce your argument.
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If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary be not idle.
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When a Man is tried of London, he is tired of life.
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Truth allows no choice.
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What is the reason that women servants ... have much lower wages than men servants ... when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?
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How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
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The whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death.
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One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.
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To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.
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Shakespeare never had more than 6 lines together without a fault.
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All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.
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The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another.
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No man can perform so little as not to have reason to congratulate himself on his merits, when he beholds the multitude that live in total idleness, and have never yet endeavoured to be useful.
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