"Example is always more efficacious than precept."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 58 of 88)
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"Truth has no gradations; nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true."
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"Happiness," said he, "must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty."
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"There must always be some advantage on one side or the other, and it is better that advantage should be had by talents than by chance."
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"We are told, that the black bear is innocent; but I should not like to trust myself with him."
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"The future is bought with the present."
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"Commerce however we may please ourselves with the contrary opinion, is one of the daughters of fortune, inconstant and deceitful as her mother. She chooses her residence where she is least expected, and shifts her abode when her continuance is, in appearance, most firmly settled."
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"Commerce can never be at a stop while one man wants what another can supply; and credit will never be denied, while it is likely to be repaid with profit."
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"There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect; compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition are names of happiness; yet this worst, this meanest fate, every one who dares to write has reason to fear."
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"Those authors are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence."
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"It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact."
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"Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct."
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"An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace."
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"The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders."
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"Nothing is difficult, when gain and honour unite their influence."
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"The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on."
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"Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good. and A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives."
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"Sir, I have no objection to a man's drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences."
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"To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made without, a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have, with equal blindness, hated their country."
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"There are few so free from vanity as not to dictate to those who will hear their instructions with a visible sense of their own beneficence."
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