2,116 Quotes by Samuel Johnson

They who look but little into futurity, have, perhaps, the quickest sensation of the present.

Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.

The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.

What is good only because it pleases cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please.

If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion.

To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made without, a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have, with equal blindness, hated their country.

He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others.

To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seem to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.