"Pain and disease awaken us to convictions which are necessary to our moral condition."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 43 of 88)
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"Politeness is fictitious benevolence."
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"Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired."
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"I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself."
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"There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible."
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"Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence."
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"It is easy for a man who sits idle at home, and has nobody to please but himself, to ridicule or censure the common practices of mankind."
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"In the description of night in Macbeth, the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness - inspissated gloom."
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"The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered."
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"When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer their inferior while he is with them, it must be highly gratifying to them."
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"An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say."
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"Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having."
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"Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy."
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"A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion."
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"The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed."
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"Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying."
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"I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession."
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"A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity."
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"Diligence in employments of less consequence is the most successful introduction to greater enterprises."
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"We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor"
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