Samuel Johnson

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

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

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

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 a book.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.