Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of "the most famous single biographical work in the whole of literature," James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth18 September 1709
There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence.
The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.
There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.
Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. Those that walk with vigor, three hours a day, will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe.
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.
Wine gives great pleasure; and every pleasure is of itself a good. It is a good, unless counterbalanced by evil.
Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.
Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality.
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.