Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
Author
Samuel Johnson
112 quotations
About Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson, often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer and polymath who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The work for which he is best known is his 42,733-entry Dictionary of the English Language (1755). For this and other contributions in and to the English language, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has called him "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English …
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Samuel JohnsonYou can't be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who's for you and who's against you.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
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.
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
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The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and... the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.
You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, …
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.