"Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 38 of 88)
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"What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read."
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"Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred."
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"Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood."
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"He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation."
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"The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform. It is true, that no diligence can ascertain success; death may intercept the swiftest career; but he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking has at least the honour of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle, though he missed the victory."
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"Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity."
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"Greece appears to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance"
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"Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones."
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"Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary."
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"It is necessary to the success of flattery, that it be accommodated to particular circumstances or characters, and enter the heart on that side where the passions are ready to receive it."
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"One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read."
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"This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed."
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"The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added."
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"Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen."
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"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic."
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"Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation."
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"Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves."
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"Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us."
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"That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both."
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