Best 1577 quotes of Samuel Johnson on MyQuotes

1. Turn all care out of your head as soon as you mount the chaise. 2. Do not think about frugality: your health is worth more than it can cost. 3. Do not continue any day's journey to fatigue. 4. Take now and then a day's rest. 5. Get a smart seasickness if you can. 6. Cast away all anxiety, and keep your mind easy. This last direction is the principal; with an unquiet mind neither exercise, nor diet, nor physic can be of much use.

A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.

A blaze first pleases and then tires the sight.

A book should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it.

Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right.

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.

Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end

A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.

...a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes any other use of his enlargement, than to do, with greater cunning, what he did before with less.

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

A country gentleman should bring his lady to visit London as soon as he can, that they may have agreeable topicks for conversation when they are by themselves.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.

A coxcomb is ugly all over with the effectation of a fine gentleman.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

Admiration begins where acquaintance ceases

Admiration must be continued by that novelty which first produces it; and how much soever is given, there must always be reason to imagine that more remains.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused

Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious; but, for the same reason, every one is eager to instruct his neighbors.

Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious. But for the same reason everyone is eager to instruct his neighbours. To be wise or to be virtuous is to buy dignity and importance at a high price; but when nothing is necessary to elevation but detection of the follies or faults of others, no man is so insensible to the voice of fame as to linger on the ground.

Advice is offensive, it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves.

Advice is offensive, not because it lays us open to unexpected regret, or convicts us of any fault which had escaped our notice, but because it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves; and the officious monitor is persecuted with hatred, not because his accusation is false, but because he assumes that superiority which we are not willing to grant him, and has dared to detect what we desired to conceal.

Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.

A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.

Affectation is to be always distinguished from hypocrisy as being the art of counterfeiting those qualities, which we might with innocence and safety, be known to want. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly.

Affectation naturally counterfeits those excellences which are placed at the greatest distance from possibility of attainment, because, knowing our own defects, we eagerly endeavor to supply them with artificial excellence.

A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible.

Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.

A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience.

A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.

Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.

Ah! Sir, a boy's being flogged is not so severe as a man's having the hiss of the world against him.

A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge.

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing - it only hastens fools to rush in where angels fear to tread.

All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.

All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted.

Allegories drawn to great length will always break.