Samuel Johnson Quotes: 22

• The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

• If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

• What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

• Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

• Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

• The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

• A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

  Works of Samuel Johnson

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

  Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II

• I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

• Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

  The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

• It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.

• Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

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

  The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

• Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

• That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

• Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

• Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

• Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.

  The Life of Samuel Johnson Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Vol 2

• Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.

  The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

• People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures!

  The Life of Samuel Johnson Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Vol 2

• There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.

• There is nothing, Sir, 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.