Quotes by Samuel Johnson

People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

The world is not yet exhaused; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

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

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.
(attributed)

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
(attributed)

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
(attributed; also attributed to Ann Landers)

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
(as quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson ,May 8th, 1781)

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
(Boswell, The Life of ,1791)

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
(from Boswell's Life of Johnson)

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
(from Boswell's Life of Johnson)

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
(Life of Boerhaave)

What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.
(Lives of the Poets)

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
(quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson)