"Men have solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 25 of 88)
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"In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge."
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"It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them."
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"If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system."
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"He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it."
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"Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most."
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"I soon found that wit, like every other power, has its boundaries; that its success depends upon the aptitude of others to receive impressions; and that as some bodies, indissoluble by heat, can set the furnace and crucible at defiance, there are min"
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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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"In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives."
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"It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief."
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"A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him."
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"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language."
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"Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."
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"Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it"
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"Advice is offensive, not because it lays us open to unexpected regret, or convicts us of any fault which had escaped our notice, but because it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves; and the officious monitor is persecuted with hatred, not because his accusation is false, but because he assumes that superiority which we are not willing to grant him, and has dared to detect what we desired to conceal."
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"Such is the constitution of man that labour may be styled its own reward; nor will any external incitements be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body."
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"Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off."
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"Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation."
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"The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small."
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"Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know That life protracted is protracted woe."
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