Samuel Johnson
545 quotes
Biography
Samuel Johnson, often called Dr. Johnson, was an English writer and polymath who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer.
"The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne."
"If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair."
"Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions."
"The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope."
"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."
"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."
"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."
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
"It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness."
"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
"Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise."
"That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner."
"Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent."
"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."
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."
"Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent."
"People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures!"
"There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it."
"There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible."
"Memory is the mother of all wisdom."
"To neglect at any time preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack."
"[S]uch is the delight of mental superiority, that none on whom nature or study have conferred it, would purchase the gifts of fortune by its loss."
"It is always observable that silence propagates itself, and that the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find any thing to say."
"The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life."
"Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving."