Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
Reflection makes men cowards.
As a general rule, those who are dissatisfied with themselves will seek to go out of themselves into an ideal world. Persons in strong health and spirits, who take plenty of air and exercise, who are "in favor with, their stars," and have a thorough relish of the good things of this life, seldom devote themselves in despair to religion or the muses. Sedentary, nervous, hypochondriacal people, on the contrary, are forced, for want of an appetite for the real and substantial, to look out for a more airy food and speculative comforts.
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.
We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.
Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
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