2,116 Quotes by Samuel Johnson

Whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.

Complaints are vain; we will try to. do better another time. To-morrow and to-morrow. A few designs and a few failures, and the time of designing is past.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.

The first years of man must make provision for the last.

Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.

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.

Wine gives great pleasure; and every pleasure is of itself a good. It is a good, unless counterbalanced by evil.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.