Authors
Samuel Johnson
1709 – 1784
Samuel Johnson was an English writer and critic best known for single-handedly writing one of the first great dictionaries of the English language, a project that took him about nine years. He was also a witty conversationalist whose clever remarks were recorded and published by his friend James Boswell. His dictionary shaped how English spelling and definitions were understood for generations.
Quotes
“Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.”
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
“He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.”
“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
“The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.”
“The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.”
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
“Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship.”
“If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.”
“But friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness, and its permanence from the other; and therefore requires not only that its candidates should gain the judgment, but that they should attract the affections; that they should not only be firm in the day of distress, but gay in the hour of jollity; not only useful in exigencies, but pleasing in familiar life; their presence should give cheerfulness as well as courage, and dispel alike the gloom of fear and of melancholy.”
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to further progress.”
“It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.”
“No man past the middle point of life can sit down to feast upon the pleasures of youth without finding the banquet embittered by the cup of sorrow; he may revive lucky accidents, and pleasing extravagancies; many days of harmless frolick, or nights of honest festivity, will perhaps recur; or, if he has been engaged in scenes of action, and acquainted with affairs of difficulty and vicissitudes of fortune, he may enjoy the nobler pleasure of looking back upon distress firmly supported, dangers resolutely encountered, and opposition artfully defeated.”
“A few years make such havock in human generations, that we soon see ourselves deprived of those with whom we entered the world, and whom the participation of pleasures or fatigues had endeared to our remembrance.”
“Thus every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from the time to come. In youth we have nothing past to entertain us, and in age, we derive little from retrospect but hopeless sorrow.”
“Whether to be remembered in remote times be worthy of a wise man's wish, has not yet been satisfactorily decided; and, indeed, to be long remembered, can happen to so small a number, that the bulk of mankind has very little interest in the question.”
“Reputation is therefore a meteor, which blazes a while and disappears for ever; and, if we except a few transcendent and invincible names, which no revolutions of opinion or length of time is able to suppress; all those that engage our thoughts, or diversify our conversation, are every moment hasting to obscurity, as new favourites are adopted by fashion.”