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“Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.”
Samuel Johnson
“Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.”
Samuel Johnson
“Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.”
Samuel Johnson
“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
Samuel Johnson
“Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.”
Samuel Johnson
“Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”
Samuel Johnson
“The true art of memory is the art of attention.”
Samuel Johnson
“There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.”
Samuel Johnson
“A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.”
Samuel Johnson
“Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.”
Samuel Johnson
“A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.”
Samuel Johnson
“Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.”
Samuel Johnson
“From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.”
Samuel Johnson
“I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.”
Samuel Johnson
“That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.”
Samuel Johnson
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
Samuel Johnson
“When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.”
Samuel Johnson
“Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.”
Samuel Johnson
“Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.”
Samuel Johnson
“I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.”
Samuel Johnson
“Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.”
Samuel Johnson
“So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.”
Samuel Johnson
“The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.”
Samuel Johnson
“Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.”
Samuel Johnson
“He that undervalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them.”
Samuel Johnson
“I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.”
Samuel Johnson
“Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.”
Samuel Johnson
“Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.”
Samuel Johnson
“It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.”
Samuel Johnson
“So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.”
Samuel Johnson
