"If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still"
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 40 of 88)
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"There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow."
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"He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper."
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"Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults."
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"No, Sir, you will have much more influence by giving or lending money where it is wanted, than by hospitality."
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"Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance."
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"His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises."
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"As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy."
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"Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good."
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"Never, my dear Sir, do you take it into your head that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary piety."
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"There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved."
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"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote."
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"Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained"
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"Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children."
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"Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat."
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"It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together."
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"My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five."
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"None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances."
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"The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear."
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"To excite opposition and inflame malevolence is the unhappy privilege of courage made arrogant by consciousness of strength."
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