Samuel Johnson Quotes

• Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

  Samuel Johnson

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• It is our first duty to serve society, and, after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged.

  Samuel Johnson

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• That all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils.

  Samuel Johnson

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• He that tries to recommend him 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.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

  Samuel Johnson

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• A very unclubbable man.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on its hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

  Samuel Johnson

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• It is burning a farthing candle at Dover, to shew light at Calais.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

  Samuel Johnson

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• In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Truth, Sir, is a cow, that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

  Samuel Johnson

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• A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one.

  Samuel Johnson

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• But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses, let us count our spoons.

  Samuel Johnson

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• The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!

  Samuel Johnson

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• The notion of liberty amuses the people of England, and helps to keep off the taedium vitae. When a butcher tells you that his heart bleeds for his country he has, in fact, no uneasy feeling.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving.

  Samuel Johnson

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• Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

  Samuel Johnson

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• The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast, but to gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right, and practice cruelty without incentive… But there is reason to hope…that the light of the gospel will at last illuminate the sands of Africa, and the deserts of America, though its progress cannot but be slow when it is so much obstructed by the lives of Christians.

  Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson (371)

Birth:	18th September, 1709
Death:	13th December, 1784
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Author, Critic, Essayist, Poet

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