2,116 Quotes by Samuel Johnson

There is something in obstinacy which differs from every other passion. Whenever it fails, it never recovers, but either breaks like iron, or crumbles sulkily away, like a fractured arch. Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest, their sufferings and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the first wound is mortal.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

A man has no more right to say an uncivil thing than to act one; no more right to say a rude thing to another than to knock him down.

We never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart.

Among the many inconsistencies which folly produces or infirmity suffers in the human mind, there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings... Those whom the appearance of virtue or the evidence of genius has tempted to a nearer knowledge of the writer, in whose performances they may be found, have indeed had frequent reason to repent their curiosity.

Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.