Johnson

Quotes

• The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things--the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

• Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.

• Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, "I did not give it to the man, but to humanity."

• 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.

• Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterward propagate it.

• Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

• Judgment is forced upon us by experience.

• He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many foulder in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

• It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

• The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.

• Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

• One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read.

• One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

• Confidence is a plant of slow growth; especially in an aged bosom.