Quotes
Quotes - Johnson
Remarriage: A triumph of hope over experience.
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
Conjecture as to things useful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle.
As the Spanish proverb says, "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in traveling: a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil where he is known.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life.
There is nothing 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.
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
When my water-proof umbrella proved a sieve, sieve, sieve, When my shiny new umbrella proved a sieve.
The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.
Wickedness is always easier than virtue, for it takes a short cut to everything.
There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.
A vow is a snare for sin.
We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Oh, what a blamed uncertain thing This pesky weather is; It blew and snew and then it thew, And now, by jing, it's friz!
All theory is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it.
This man [Chesterfield] I thought had been a lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among lords.
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.
This mournful truth is everywhere confess'd, Slow rises worth by poverty depress'd.
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.
I remember a passage in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: "I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing."
