"Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance."
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 23 of 88)
1.7K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show."
Read quote
7 likes
"Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which bear out the past."
Read quote
7 likes
"There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible."
Read quote
7 likes
"He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground."
Read quote
7 likes
"Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss."
Read quote
7 likes
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."
Read quote
7 likes
"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth."
Read quote
7 likes
"The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected."
Read quote
7 likes
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."
Read quote
7 likes
"We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure."
Read quote
7 likes
"Admiration begins where acquaintance ceases"
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit."
Read quote
7 likes
"Those that have done nothing in life, are not qualified to judge of those that have done little"
Read quote
7 likes
"Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present."
Read quote
7 likes
"It requires but little acquaintance with the heart to know that woman's first wish is to be handsome; and that, consequently, the readiest method of obtaining her kindness is to praise her beauty."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. You may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learned them both."
Read quote
7 likes
"If we require more perfection from women than from ourselves, it is doing them honor."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is a maxim that no man was ever enslaved by influence while he was fit to be free."
Read quote
7 likes