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
Samuel Johnson quotes about
He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty
Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.
Let no man rashly determine, that his unwillingness to be pleased is a proof of understanding, unless his superiority appears from less doubtful evidence; for though peevishness may sometimes justly boast its descent from learning or from wit, it is
Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force.
A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Marriage, Sir, is much more necessary to a man than to a woman; for he is much less able to supply himself with domestick comforts
Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.
That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona
Such is the constitution of man that labor may be styled its own reward; nor will any external incitements be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body
No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize him and thus force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability
So many qualities are indeed requisite to the possibility of friendship, and so many accidents must concur to its rise and its continuance, that the greatest part of mankind content themselves without it, and supply its place as they can, with intere
A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see