Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

"Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings." Samuel Johnson"
283 Quotes
"Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings." Samuel Johnson"
Samuel Johnson
"Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]"
Samuel Johnson
"The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."
Samuel Johnson
"Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired."
Samuel Johnson
"I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another."
Samuel Johnson
"No one is much pleased with a companion who does not increase, in some respect, their fondness for themselves."
Samuel Johnson
"There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity."
Samuel Johnson
"My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
Samuel Johnson
"Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life . . . the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use."
Samuel Johnson
"There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it."
Samuel Johnson
"Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it."
Samuel Johnson
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it."
Samuel Johnson
"To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example."
Samuel Johnson
"While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best."
Samuel Johnson
"The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it."
Samuel Johnson
"I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works."
Samuel Johnson
"That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner."
Samuel Johnson
"Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent."
Samuel Johnson
"Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise."
Samuel Johnson
"Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words. We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind."
Samuel Johnson
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