It is common to overlook what is near by keeping the eye fixed on something remote. In the same manner present opportunities are neglected and attainable good is slighted by minds busied in extensive ranges, and intent upon future advantages. Life, however short, is made shorter by waste of time.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: The Present, Reality, Present, Opportunities, Opportunity
Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Evil, Secrets, Secrecy
A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs. A Judge may play a little at cards for his own amusement; but he is not to play at marbles, or chuck farthing in the Piazza.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Judgment, Judges, Judging
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Idleness, Reading
An Italian philosopher said that “time was his estate” an estate indeed which will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the labors of industry, and generally satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part of it be suffered to lie in waste by negligence, to be overrun with noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Time, Time Management, Value of Time
Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Opinion, Public opinion
Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
—Samuel Johnson
Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Trouble, Debt
Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste on the other, by which, on the same income, another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Economy, Waste
There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can, in this state, receive no answer; Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? And since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Creation, Questions
Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured; but thousands and millions are of small avail to alleviate the tortures of the gout, to repair the broken organs of sense, or resuscitate the powers of digestion. Poverty is, indeed, an evil from which we naturally fly; but let us not run from one enemy to another, nor take shelter in the arms of sickness.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Health
Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Cities, City Life
Men are not blindly betrayed into corruption, but abandon themselves to their passions with their eyes open; and lose the direction of truth, because they do not attend to her voice, not because they do not understand it.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Passion
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation, part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop. Contempt is the proper punishment of affectation, and detestation the just consequence of hypocrisy.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: One liners, Hypocrisy
The true sound and strong mind is the one that can embrace equally great and small things.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Mind, The Mind
That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Friendship
Reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.
—Samuel Johnson
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Women
No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.
—Samuel Johnson
In a man’s letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Letters
Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
—Samuel Johnson
A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Genius
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
Topics: Anticipation, Happiness, Change
Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don’t think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire.
—Samuel Johnson
I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Originality, Innovation
You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Silence
If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Pleasure
Pity is not natural to man. Children and savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; but we have not pity unless we wish to relieve his. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it late, bid the coachman make haste, when he whips his horses I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist; no, sir; I wish him to drive on.
—Samuel Johnson
He was so generally civil that nobody thanked him for it.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Temper
No man is defeated without some resentment, which will be continued with obstinacy while he believes himself in the right, and asserted with bitterness, if even to his own conscience he is detected in the wrong.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Defeat
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Joseph Addison English Poet, Playwright, Politician
- Lytton Strachey British Biographer
- William Hazlitt English Essayist
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Writer
- A. C. Benson English Essayist
- Arthur Helps British Essayist, Historian
- Lawrence Durrell English Author, Poet
- V. S. Pritchett British Short Story Writer
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson British Poet
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