"A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still."

Johnson, Samuel on Abuse
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"Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."

Johnson, Samuel on Adversity
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"The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions."

Johnson, Samuel on Advertising
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"Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement."

Johnson, Samuel on Advertising
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"The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery."

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"When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am."

Johnson, Samuel on Age and Aging
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"At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest."

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"Small debts are like small gun shot; they are rattling around us on all sides and one can scarcely escape being wounded. Large debts are like canons, they produce a loud noise, but are of little danger."

Johnson, Samuel on Debt
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"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."

Johnson, Samuel on Deception
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"Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment."

Johnson, Samuel on Desire
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"Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy."

Johnson, Samuel on Desire
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"If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance."

Johnson, Samuel on Determination
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"Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true."

Johnson, Samuel on Dictionaries
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"Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few."

Johnson, Samuel on Dictionaries
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"Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words."

Johnson, Samuel on Dictionaries
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"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance."

Johnson, Samuel on Diligence
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"Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue."

Johnson, Samuel on Disappointments
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"No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation."

Johnson, Samuel on Disapproval
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"Disease generally begins that equality which death completes."

Johnson, Samuel on Disease
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"Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one."

Johnson, Samuel on Dress
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"Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great."

Johnson, Samuel on Dullness
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"Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

Johnson, Samuel on Editing and Editors
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"What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence."

Johnson, Samuel on Effort
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"A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice."

Johnson, Samuel on Entertainment
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"The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking."

Johnson, Samuel on Enthusiasm
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"His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises."

Johnson, Samuel on Envy
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"In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath."

Johnson, Samuel on Epitaphs
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"Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure."

Johnson, Samuel on Equality
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"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."

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"It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality."

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"They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master."

Johnson, Samuel on Example
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"Exercise is labor without weariness."

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"I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed."

Johnson, Samuel on Expectation
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"As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors; nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too."

Johnson, Samuel on Extravagance
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"He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel."

Johnson, Samuel on Fame
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"To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed."

Johnson, Samuel on Fame
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"Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children."

Johnson, Samuel on Family
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"Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God."

Johnson, Samuel on Fear
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"Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize"

Johnson, Samuel on Fear
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"Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other."

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