Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Quotes

• It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

• Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

• It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

• You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

• To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

• No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

• He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

• The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another.

• Grief is a species of idleness.

• There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

• Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.

• Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

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

• Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

• I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

• Anybody who thinks of going to bed before 12 o'clock is a scoundrel.

• The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another

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

• You must have taken great pains, sir; you could not naturally been so very stupid.

• I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.