Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
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 JohnsonSuch is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.
Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.
There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
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Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.
Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.
There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.