Quotes

Quotes - Johnson


From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,--
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.

Samuel Johnson

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow,--attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Samuel Johnson

"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."

Samuel Johnson

A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.

Samuel Johnson

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.

Samuel Johnson

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

Samuel Johnson

I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

Samuel Johnson

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Samuel Johnson

The first years of man must make provision for the last.

Samuel Johnson

Example is always more efficacious than precept.

Samuel Johnson

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

Samuel Johnson

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Samuel Johnson

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

Samuel Johnson

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

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

The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.

Samuel Johnson

His death eclipsed the gayety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.

Samuel Johnson

That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

Samuel Johnson

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Samuel Johnson

What is read twice is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.

Samuel Johnson

Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.

Samuel Johnson

Wretched un-idea'd girls.

Samuel Johnson

This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among lords.

Samuel Johnson

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger at his death.

Samuel Johnson

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?

Samuel Johnson

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