"Pour forth thy fervors for a healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resigned"
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 64 of 88)
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"Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away,and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place."
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"Condemned to Hope's delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts or slow decline Our social comforts drop away."
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"Life of Ages, richly poured, Love of God unspent and free, Flowing in the Prophet's word And the People's liberty! Never was to chosen race That unstinted tide confined; Thine is every time and place, Fountain sweet of heart and mind!"
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"The prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness is an atrophy. Whatever body or society wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay, and every being that continues to be fed, and eases to labor, takes away something from the public stock."
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"Labor's face is wrinkled with the wind, and swarthy with the sun."
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"I do not much wish well to discoveries, for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery."
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"To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life."
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"The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence."
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"The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing."
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"Men have been wise in many different modes; but they have always laughed the same way."
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"Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet."
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"Words become low by the occasions to which they are applied, or the general character of them who use them; and the disgust which they produce arises from the revival of those images with which they are commonly united."
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"In discussing these exceptions from the course of nature, the first question is, whether the fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected."
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"In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine."
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"A newswriter is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit."
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"Inquiries into the heart are not for man."
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"Domestic discord is not inevitably and fatally necessary; but yet it is not easy to avoid."
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"It was the peculiar artifice of Habit not to suffer her power to be felt at first. Those whom she led, she had the address of appearing only to attend, but was continually doubling her chains upon her companions; which were so slender in themselves, and so silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived. Each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn; and when by continual additions they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken."
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"Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist."
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