"A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 70 of 88)
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"The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion."
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"Long customs are not easily broken; he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain; and how shall we do that for others, which we are seldom able to do for ourselves."
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"The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture."
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"High people, sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman."
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"I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence."
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"Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age."
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"Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible."
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"Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost must always end in pain."
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"God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?"
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"As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas."
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"When female minds are embittered by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles."
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"Of all the grief's that harass the distressed; sure the most bitter is a scornful jest."
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"I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding."
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"He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it."
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"Books without the knowledge of life are useless."
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"The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."
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"The gratification which affluence of wealth, extent of power, and eminence of reputation confer, must be always, by their own nature, confined to a very small number; and the life of the greater part of mankind must be lost in empty wishes and painful comparisons, were not the balm of philosophy shed upon us, and our discontent at the appearances of unequal distribution soothed and appeased."
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"It is natural for every man uninstructed to murmur at his condition, because, in the general infelicity of life, he feels his own miseries without knowing that they are common to all the rest of the species; and, therefore, though he will not be less sensible of pain by being told that others are equally tormented, he will at least be freed from the temptation of seeking, by perpetual changes, that ease which is no where to be found, and though his diseases still continue, he escapes the hazard of exasperating it by remedies."
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"I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind."
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