Samuel Johnson

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

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

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.