Samuel Johnson

“Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.”

“Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.”

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”

“Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.”

“The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”

“There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”

“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”

“He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.”

“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”

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

“All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.”

“If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.”

“The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.”

“Words are but the signs of ideas.”

“It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.”

“Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.”

“What is easy is seldom excellent.”

“Exercise is labor without weariness.”

“Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.”