Samuel Johnson Quotes About Bravery

• [C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

  Samuel Johnson

  Meaningful, Courage, Men

  Samuel Johnson (1798). “Dr. Johnson's Table Talk: Containing Aphorisms on Literature, Life, and Manners; with Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, Selected and Arranged from Dr. Boswell's Life of Johnson”, p.126

• Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

  Samuel Johnson

  Courage, Bravery, Be Brave

  Samuel Johnson (1836). “Johnsoniana; or supplement to Boswell; being Anecdotes and sayings of Dr. Johnson, etc”

• These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

  Samuel Johnson

  Country, Honesty, Integrity

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1811). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, L. L. D.: In Twelve Volumes”, p.115

• Without good humour, learning and bravery can only confer that superiority which swells the heart of the lion in the desert, where he roars without reply, and ravages without resistance. Without good humour virtue may awe by its dignity and amaze by its brightness, but must always be viewed at a distance, and will scarcely gain a friend or attract an imitator.

  Samuel Johnson

  Distance, Heart, Bravery

  Samuel Johnson (1784). “The Rambler: In Four Volumes..”, p.102

• Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and far from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Ionia.

  Samuel Johnson

  Philosophy, Thinking, Past

  'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland' (1775) 'Inch Kenneth'

• The whole power of cunning is privative; to say nothing, and to do nothing , is the utmost of its reach. Yet men, thus narrow by nature and mean by art, are sometimes able to rise by the miscarriages of bravery and the openness of integrity, and, watching failures and snatching opportunities, obtain advantages which belong to higher characters.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Integrity, Character

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

You May Also Like:

James Boswell

Dick Clark

Alexander Pope

Joshua Reynolds

John Milton

Jonathan Swift

Oliver Goldsmith