Samuel Johnson

“Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.”

“The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.”

“The true art of memory is the art of attention.”

“Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

“Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.”

“If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.”

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

“Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.”

“One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.”

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”

“The future is purchased by the present.”

“I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.”

“He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.”

“Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.”

“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

“What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.”

“Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.”

“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”

“Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.”