"This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery."
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Quote collection
Samuel Johnson quotes (page 79 of 88)
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"Dogs have not the power of comparing. A dog will take a small piece of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him."
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"Luncheon: as much food as one's hand can hold."
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"In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry."
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"Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of a larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?"
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"Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words."
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"Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason, than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind, for the only blessings which nature has put into our power, tranquillity and benevolence. To look up to the sky for the nutriment of our bodies, is the condition of nature; to call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly."
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"It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm."
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"A thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope."
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"...a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes any other use of his enlargement, than to do, with greater cunning, what he did before with less."
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"Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is."
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"He that has too much to do will do something wrong."
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"Every man's affairs, however little, are important to himself."
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"Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, - judgement, to estimate things at their true value."
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"Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford."
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"People in distress never think that you feel enough."
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"About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right."
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"If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven."
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"Keeping accounts, sir, is of no use when a man is spending his own money, and has nobody to whom he is to account. You won't eat less beef today because you have written down what it cost yesterday."
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"With what hope can we endeavor to persuade the ladies that the time spent at the toilet is lost in vanity."
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