Samuel Johnson quotes

“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.”

— Samuel Johnson

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

— Samuel Johnson

“What is easy is seldom excellent.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Love is only one of many passions.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?”

— Samuel Johnson

“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”

— Samuel Johnson

“The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.”

— Samuel Johnson

“It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.”

— Samuel Johnson

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

“The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.”

— Samuel Johnson

“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.”

— Samuel Johnson

“It is better to live rich than to die rich.”

— Samuel Johnson

“No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”

— Samuel Johnson

“The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and... the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.”

— Samuel Johnson

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”

— Samuel Johnson

“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