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
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.
No cause more frequently produces bashfulness than too high an opinion of our own importance. He that imagines an assembly filled with his merit, panting with expectation, and hushed with attention, easily terrifies himself with the dread of disappointing them, and strains his imagination in pursuit of something that may vindicate the veracity of fame, and show that his reputation was not gained by chance.
I am a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.
Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.