Samuel Johnson Quotes About Mistakes

• One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

  Samuel Johnson

  Mistake, Drinking, Food

  "Life of Samuel Johnson". Book by James Boswell. Volume II, p. 659, 1791.

• It is incident to physicians, I am afraid, beyond all other men, to mistake subsequence for consequence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Mistake, Men, Physicians

  1734 Review of Dr Lucas's Essay on Waters, 25 Nov.

• Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without very accurate inquiry whether it is right. It is sufficient that another is growing great in his own eyes at our expense, and assumes authority over us without our permission; for many would contentedly suffer the consequences of their own mistakes, rather than the insolence of him who triumphs as their deliverer.

  Samuel Johnson

  Mistake, Eye, Vanity

  Samuel Johnson (1824). “The works of Samuel Johnson”, p.99

• I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind.

  Samuel Johnson

  Mistake, Miscarriage, Men

  Samuel Johnson (1840). “The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson...”, p.259

• That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

  Samuel Johnson

  Funny, Mistake, Humorous

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 1770)

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