Samuel Johnson Quotes About Manners

• Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.

  Samuel Johnson

  Elegance, Manners, Mark

  Samuel Johnson (1807). “Dr. Johnson's Table-talk: Containing Aphorisms on Literature, Life, and Manners, with Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, Selected and Arranged from Mr. Boswell's Life of Johnson”, p.105

• He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Courtesy, Manners

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1866). “The Life of Samuel Johnson”, p.122

• Truth, like beauty, varies its fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literatures of his own age. As the manners of nations vary, new topicks of persuasion become necessary, and new combinations of imagery are produced; and he that can accommodate himself to the reigning taste, may always have readers who perhaps would not have looked upon better performances.

  Samuel Johnson

  Fashion, Writing, Mind

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

• Plenty is the original cause of many of our needs; and even the poverty, which is so frequent and distressful in civilized nations, proceeds often from that change of manners which opulence has produced. Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries; but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

  Samuel Johnson

  Names, Giving, Needs

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

• Politeness is fictitious benevolence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Manners, Politeness, Benevolence

  Dr. Samuel Johnson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Johnson (Illustrated)”, p.8598, Delphi Classics

• [The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Generations, Poet

  Rasselas ch. 10 (1759)

• Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings because they are his own.

  Samuel Johnson

  Friends, Failing, Manners

  Samuel Johnson (1827). “The Rambler”, p.167

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