Samuel Johnson Quotes

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief which he purposes to remove.

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

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.

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.

Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.

Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.

I am a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of the fascinating plant; who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the midnight, and with tea welcomed the morning.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

The basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power.