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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.

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
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson

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To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
Samuel Johnson
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Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage.
Samuel Johnson
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I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
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Poetry cannot be translation
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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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The desires of man increase with his acquisitions.
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Domestic discord is not inevitably and fatally necessary but yet it is not easy to avoid.
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If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary be not idle.
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When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed
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Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.
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How small of all that human hearts endure/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
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Shakespeare never had more than 6 lines together without a fault.
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Levellers wish to level down as far as themselves but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.
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The future is purchased by the present.
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An old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.
Samuel Johnson
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Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
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Too much vigor in the beginning of an undertaking often intercepts and prevents the steadiness and perseverance always necessary in the conduct of a complicated scheme.
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When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
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This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.
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He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
Samuel Johnson