2,116 Quotes by Samuel Johnson

I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces.

To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them; for they prove, at least, our power, and show that our favour is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood.

Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.

People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.

Advice is offensive, not because it lays us open to unexpected regret, or convicts us of any fault which had escaped our notice, but because it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves; and the officious monitor is persecuted with hatred, not because his accusation is false, but because he assumes that superiority which we are not willing to grant him, and has dared to detect what we desired to conceal.

Lawful and settled authority is very seldom resisted when it is well employed.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

He that tries to recommend (Shakespeare) by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in "Hierocles", who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen

He that finds his knowledge narrow, and his arguments weak, and by consequence his suffrage not much regarded, is sometimes in hope of gaining that attention by his clamours which he cannot otherwise obtain, and is pleased with remembering that at la